September 1, 2007
The only problem I have with my 13" MacBook is the tiny harddrive. 60GB really isn't enough these days. So today I bought a new hard drive, a Seagate Momentus 160GB 7200rpm.The installation went easier than I thought. Except, as you might have guessed from this post's title, something did go wrong with the fonts.I started by copying the old drive to an external usb drive with SuperDuper (a highly recommended freemium backup app) . Next I switched the old and new drive. Apple has this pdf with instructions. Not mentioned in the instructions is the fact that you need a Torx T-7 screwdriver to unscrew the harddrive case.To my surprise booting from the usb drive was a non-issue. As long as you've formatted the drive to be an Intel-mac bootable drive (In the Disk utility under the options button, choose GUID) it automatically boots from it if there is no other bootdisk. I used SuperDuper again to copy the external drive to the new harddisk. Great, still no errors!One more reboot (now booting from the internal drive) and I would be ready.The first thing that I noticed was that some icons in my dock had been replaced by folder icons and the links were pointing to a bunch of header files. Not a big deal, just replace the icons by dragging them from the applications folder.I started to check if everything was still there, opened LightRoom and iTunes and saw all was OK. But when I opened a TextMate project I noticed the fonts were different. The font I normally use when programming is Anonymous, and it had apparently vanished from my system. Reinstalling the font didn't work. Lots of fonts were missing in the Fontbook.The solution to this problem is the font-cache. I don't really understand this yet, but apparently you need to clean the cache and let your system rebuild it. Great, how do I do this? Well it seems Mark Douma created a small app just for this: Font Finagler. Just run it and click 'Clean Font Cache' (you can do this for free 10 times) . A reboot later and you're all done!I haven't found any other problems since I migrated to the new disk. I like the increase in speed (the standard drive is a 5400rpm one) and capacity.Just thought I'd blog about this issue as I couldn't find it described anywhere else on the internet.
Discussion, links, and tweets
I work at Venture Spirit. Follow me on Twitter;
you'll enjoy my tweets. I take care to carefully craft each one. Or at least aim to make
you giggle. Or offended. One of those two— I haven't decided which yet.