About to leave town for a couple of days - so this is short and I can't follow up immediately.

Here is my story -- I wanted to replace a HDD in a MacBook Pro. It came with 320GB, 5400 RPM and I wanted 500 GB 7200 RPM.

So I made a SuperDuper backup. (At this point I verified I could boot from that backup.) Next I physically swapped the two MacBook Pro drives. Next I booted from the external HDD. At that point I did a SuperDuper copy/clone from the external HDD to the new drive I had placed in the machine.

Somewhere I had to format the new drive and I do not recall exactly where in the sequence I did the format.

There is a key to hold down at boot time which gives you a choice of boot drives. Google can tell you what key. Also you need to have the external HDD connected when you press the start button.

The only panic moment I recall was my mouse and trackpad did not work. So I had to navigate with the arrow keys. Mostly it just took time.

Good Luck

Gordon
Atlanta