Well, my new hard drive showed up at the door today before lunch, so like the geek I am I shut down my laptop and switched drives by 12:30 PM. One of the nice things about the Mac operating system Leopard on my MacBook is that it automatically backs up everything every hour to my external drive. So, I was able to restore my last back up to the new drive, and by 3:00 PM I had logged back in with all (hopefully) of my settings intact. It simply looks like I have 150GB of free space now instead of the 4GB I’ve been struggling with the past number of months.

 There seems to be a couple of caveats. After booting up with the Leopard install DVD and formatting the new drive, it would not show up as a destination for the Time Machine backup. I was wondering what the problem was, and thought I had to install the OS first, when I came across a posting online (using my iPod touch - yay for mobile Safari). Someone else had the same problem, and simply rebooting with the install DVD fixed the issue. Worked for me too. After about two hours, I restarted again and logged in!

I haven’t done a lot yet, as the machine is chugging away updating the Time Machine disk (for some reason) and re-index the search database. At least one icon on the dock was missing: a link to a folder of IEEE publications. The folder was still in my Documents directory, so I simply deleted the borked icon and replaced it.

I’ll have to set up Boot Camp again, although I am debating it. I think I booted into Windows about 5 times since I set it up. I used to use Parallels a fair bit more, although it was having occasional fits with the Boot Camp partition. Recent updates appear to have fixed the problems, but I haven’t been using Parallels much recently either. Java development is slightly better in IntelliJ under Windows, but not enough to make me want to run it there regularly.

Yay for extra space! Now I can finally keep all my music and photos on my laptop.