upgrades...

The Pismo G3 now has a bigger hard drive. I picked up a 60GB Fujitsu MHV2060AH, after many hours comparing brands and specs and trying to ensure that it would work. My Windows experience of drive cloning wasn't good, and I wasn't looking forward to reloading everything manually onto the new disk. However, my internet travels came by a good little application called Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a `donation-shareware' program that does a full disk clone onto a new one. I installed the new drive into a USB enclosure, connected it up to the Pismo (via USB 1.1 UGH!), formatted and partitioned the drive with Disk Utility, started CCC and left it to it for the evening. All seemed to transfer ok, so I removed the new drive from the enclosure, swapped it with the original 20GB one in the computer, turned on...and...it all worked! There was my computer, just as before, all files in place, except that now the hard drive icon was revised to represent the [two] partitions of the newly formatted 60GB disk.

For those wanting to upgrade their Mac's hard-drive via the `cloning' process, I can recommend Carbon Copy Cloner, and there is a facility to make a donation to the company. I would suggest that a Firewire or USB 2.0 drive would be much quicker way to make the transfer, though. I do lament the fact that, despite Firewire's real-world speed advantage over USB 2.0, Firewire products are still more expensive and harder to find than USB 2.0. Must be part of another Windows conspiracy...