Instructions on How To Replace a Hard Drive in a Macbook A1181

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macbook_13_whiteSo a client of mine called me up asking me if I know how to replace a hard drive in a laptop.  Sure I do, so she brought me the laptop, and handed me a Apple Macbook A1181. Now I’m no mac tech, so I was kinda lost at first when it came to replacing the hard drive. But lucky for me, I found a PDF that outlines exactly how to do it, and holy sweetness its easy.

So i have attached the PDF for you to download so you too can replace your harddrive if you ever need to.

A couple of quick tips to add:

If you are installing a new harddrive, you might need to go into the Disk Utilities and “Erase” the hard drive. Erase it to MacOS Extended Journaled (unless you want to use one of the other options) and name the hard drive “Macintosh HDD.” You probably dont have to name it that, but thats what Apple does, so for consistancy I did the same thing.

disk-utility-02So to get to the Disk Utility, Boot off the OS disk by holding your C key as you power on the unit. Let it get to the welcome screen, and then go to menu on top, where the apple is, file, and so on. Under utilities, you will find the disk utility.

I had to do this to the hard drive before the OS would recognize it as a Destination to install the OS too. Before it wouldn’t detect the hard drive in there, so hopefully if you experience this too, now you know what to do.

  • http://www.silicon.ir Babak

    Hi

    Frist Thanks you for your informations

    Do you have any instruction for replace DVD ROM ?

    Kind Regards
    Babak

  • http://www.DanielBrincat.com Daniel

    I dont, Im sorry.

  • http://www.tatrtalk.com tatrtalk

    Great help! Thanks! :)

  • http://www.DanielBrincat.com Daniel

    Sweet! Glad it helped ya out! ;)

  • bangers

    Thanks for the link, worked a treat.

  • lOgOx2

    where i can find a hard drive?

  • http://www.DanielBrincat.com Daniel

    Any retail place that sells laptop hard drives, or any number of the online places like newegg.com or something.

  • Anonymous

    if you don’t know… leave this job to someone that does…

    friggin worthless mac users.

  • Topfirstdor

    Hello everybody,
    I am fritz and I have a MacBook A1181 1.5 ram, 1.83 CPU and 60G Hard Drive,
    I can understand how slow it is! 
    would you please tell me what do?

  • Anonymous

    Well Fritz, there are a couple of factors that could make the computer run slow. Do you happen to know if the hard drive in your MacBook is a 5400 RPM drive? If so, you might want to consider replacing it with at least a 7200 RPM drive. That will usually give you a noticeable increase in performance. The OS version, and features you’re running could also have an effect on the way the machine runs. The A1181 isn’t the newest computer so you cant really expect it to keep up with all the wiz-bang features of the new OS’s and machines. 1.5GB ram seem to be on the low end in today’s computing world, that could also be a factor. Just a few things to consider.

  • Tom

    Thanks for posting the PDF file. It will come in handy in the future!  :)

  • Anonymous

    You’re welcome!