Successful install of Seagate 1TB SSHD

I finally have successfully installed a new Seagate 1TB SSHD drive, and thought I'd describe the process and some problems I had and how I got around them. I can't claim this is the best or proper way to do the job, as I was floundering around a lot, but eventually it worked and I wanted to describe what worked and didn't, which might help others. I'll put the crucial parts that actually worked in bold.

The new drive was:

Seagate 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive SATA 6Gbps 64MB Cache 2.5-Inch ST1000LM014

My computer is a mid-2010 MacBook (white) with OSX Mavericks 10.9.1.

I have a large external USB drive I use for backups with Time Machine. I first did a regular Time Machine backup of my data. Then, I tried to install the new drive using this strategy: make a disk image on the backup drive using system-restore Disk Utility; remove the old drive and install the new one; restore the disk image to the new drive using system-restore Disk Utility. This DID NOT WORK. I'm still not sure why not, it seems like it should have. The problem may have been that I chose the wrong icon within Disk Utility to drag to the source drive text box: I chose the disk drive icon (not indented), whereas I now think I should have chosen the Mac OSX disk volume partition icon (indented icon). More on this below.

To SUCCESSFULLY install the drive, I bought a USB-internal HD cable (I bought the Apricorn cable) and used it to directly connect the new drive to the USB port so I could copy the data directly from the old drive to the new, using system-restore Disk Utility. Here are some notes on the process:

The actual mechanical process of installing the drive is simple, if you have a tiny phillips screwdriver (or a tiny flat-blade of the correct size, which is what I used). You just unscrew the 8 screws on the bottom cover, pop it off (being careful not to knock the rubber coating off the metal edge, as it is hard to get back in place), carefully undo the power connector (find a photo online showing it) with a LARGER screwdriver or blade so you don't break the corner off of it like I did, then unscrew the 2 screws holding the metal bar (find a photo) that holds down the drive. Pull the drive up and pull the connector off of it carefully with your fingers. There are two nubbins on the old drive that are screwed into it and stick out so that the metal bar can clamp down on them. I needed pliers to loosen these before removing them with the small screwdriver and putting them into the new drive. Then reverse the process to get the new drive in place. But this whole process is done LAST, after you have copied your data to the new drive (unless you want to try using the disk-image approach with an external USB drive, that I couldn't get to work but which might work in the right hands).

You cannot create a disk image or copy (clone) the disk that is the running OS using Disk Utility. It gives you an error message that it cannot do this, probably because the active disk is constantly changing and you don't want to try to copy a changing thing. To get around this, you need to boot into system recovery mode and use its Disk Utility, which is done by rebooting and holding down Command-R until the apple icon shows up. Mine booted this way from an internal small drive separate from the hard drive, but when that is corrupted or missing or when there is some sort of incompatibility between it and the installed hard drive (as happened the first time around when trying to use the backup disk to restore an image), my system instead boots recovery mode from the wi-fi network (I needed to enter the wi-fi password).

There is a severe problem with Disk Utility in system recovery mode. The system goes to sleep, and when it does, the disk copy process stops. Since it takes hours to do the disk copy, you aren't going to sit around pressing a key to keep the system awake. You get around this problem as follows:

- In system recovery mode, don't start Disk Utility, but instead, use the menu item that starts Terminal.

- At the Terminal window prompt, enter the commands "pmset sleep 0", "pmset disksleep 0", and "pmset displaysleep 0" to disable sleep.

- If you exit Terminal window in order to start Disk Utility, apparently the sleep settings disappear and the system still goes to sleep (at least, the alternative sleep command "pmset noidle &" does, but maybe the above commands remain in effect). To get around this, you can start Disk Utility directly from the Terminal window, as follows: use the cd and ls commands to find your way to the recovery disk folder where Disk Utility is located: start with "cd /", then "ls" to see what is there, then "cd Volumes", then "ls", then "cd OSX Startup Disk" (not the right name, and I can't find it right now, but look at the names and figure out which is the recovery disk, start over if you get it wrong), then "ls", then "cd Applications", "ls", "cd Utilities", "ls", "cd Disk\ Utility.app", "ls", "cd Contents", "ls", "cd MacOS", "ls", and finally, there is "Disk Utility" and you run it with "Disk\ Utility" or "./Disk\ Utility". Note that you can press the tab key after entering the first character or two of a name, and it will auto-complete the rest of the name, a great speedup when doing "cd" commands.

With the new drive connected to the USB with the special cable, and booted into system recovery and in Disk Utility, you first want to erase/format the new drive. You should see the drives listed on the left side of disk utility, including the original drive that you want to copy, the new drive, and the system recovery drive. If you have an external USB backup drive connected, you should see that. It is important to make distinction between two types of drives/icons shown in the list. You will see that some icons are indented relative to others. The ones that are not indented are actual physical drives. The ones that are indented are partitions or virtual disks or volumes on the drive under which they are indented. Since the term "disk" might easily refer to either one, let's use "drive" to refer to the unindented icon and "volume" to refer to the indented icon. Probably you will have only one indented volume icon under each unidented drive icon, but you will have more than one if a drive has more than one partition, or if you have the problem I experienced (more below).

Drives are formatted by choosing the "Erase" section of Disk Utility, then selecting the unindented drive icon (not volume icon), choosing Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and changing the name from untitled to something else (I don't think it matters if the name is different than the name of your original drive). Then click "Erase".

I had a problem that possibly stemmed from creating a drive image instead of a volume image on my backup drive, then attempting to restore the drive image to a volume on the new drive instead of to the new drive itself. At any rate, what happened was that my new drive showed TWO volumes, both with the same name of "Mac OS HD", and whenever I erased the new drive, one of the volumes would disappear but not the other, and then when I tried again to restore the disk image, the second volume would reappear. I finally got rid of this situation by doing an erase operation but using the Security Options button and selecting "Zero Out Data". I let this run for about 5 minutes instead of the 7 hours it wanted to run. Then I cancelled it, and lo and behold, BOTH volumes were gone from the new drive, and only the new drive icon showed up. I was then able to format the disk with plain "Erase" (maybe with a "Repair" also), followed by copying of the old disk to the new, and that was all that was necessary to get a working disk.

After formatting the new drive, I thought maybe I needed to go to the Partition section of Disk Utility and create a partition. However, this was not necessary. I didn't do it, and yet the act of copying the old disk to the new apparently automatically created a partition.

To copy the old drive's data to the new drive, after formatting the new drive as above, select the "Restore" button in Disk Utility, drag the indented VOLUME icon (not the unidented DRIVE icon) to the Source text box, drag either the drive or volume icon of the new drive to the Destination text box (I'm not sure what I dragged, or whether it matters; the description above the Destination text box says to drag a volume, not a drive. Logically, it makes sense to copy a drive to a drive, or a volume to a volume, and not cross the two. But it may be that you have to drag the drive because there is no volume after erasing the new drive, I can't remember since I went through various problems with the formatting, as described above). Then click Restore. It takes many hours to complete, and additional hours to go through its verify process. When finished, shut down, then take out the old drive and put the new one in, power up, and cross your fingers. I couldn't believe it when it worked!

The system with the new drive seems to be working well, and faster, although there was a disturbing pause while typing for a while. This seems to have gone away. I was concerned that maybe the firmware in the drive needed updating, but after considerable trouble with Seagate's problematic downloads web site, I finally got a message that my firmware was the latest and did not need upgraded.

I still think the idea of using a large backup drive with adequate space for a disk image of the old drive should be a viable way to do this. The process I would use to try this would be:

- backup data with time machine

- boot to recovery disk with Command-R held down, then start terminal, disable sleep, and start disk utility from it

- in disk utility, make a disk image by choosing "Restore", drag the VOLUME icon, not DRIVE icon, of the old disk to Source, and drag the backup drive to Destination. I can't remember now how I selected that an image be created, rather than copying and overwriting the entire backup drive, but I think it was an "image" button that did it. Click Restore.

- When the image is done being created (many hours), shut down, remove the old drive and insert the new one, and reboot into recovery mode (will boot from wifi), go to terminal, disable sleep, start disk utility from terminal.

- Select the new disk, choose "Erase", and erase it to format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a name you give it instead of untitled, and click "Erase".

- Choose "Restore", drag the backup drive to source, click "Image" and select the image file that was created, drag the volume from the new drive to the destination text box, or if there is no volume, drag the drive to the destination box, and click Restore. After many many hours, it should be done. Reboot and cross your fingers.