I recently purchased a new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro and wanted to share some of the intricacies of swapping out the hard drive.

Whenever I place an order for a new just-released machine from Apple I usually buy one of the stock configurations to avoid the potential delay of the Configure-To-Order (CTO) process. I also pay the extra $18 for delivery in "2-3 Business Days" (as opposed to opting for the free shipping) because it means that it ships via FedEx priority service and sometimes arrives several days early.

Since I purchased the 120GB configuration and my previous MacBook Pro has a 160GB drive (which is 80 percent full, mind you) it wasn't practical to use Apple's handy Migration Assistant to move my data over. Nor was it possible to clone one drive to the other with Mike Bombich's excellent Carbon Copy Cloner software.

My strategy was to physically swap the larger 160GB hard drive from the old MBP to the new one but you need to do a few things to make it work properly.

Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.