seagate momentus 500gb 7200rpm

wow. i just finished a bitchin upgrade of the hard drive in my macbook2,1. first, the two hour cloning process gave me a kernel error. but fortunately, it didnt happen on the following try. successfully cloned, i installed the new hard drive, and i ran into some problems. the original hd came out easily, but when i tried to slide in the momentus, i felt some resistance as it slid in. i was able to screw the battery bracket back in so i assumed it was okay. i booted up via the external drive with a cloned os x, and it didnt recognize the new internal drive. crap. i tried several searches and flipped through some 50 odd pages of google results over the next couple hours for the macbook not recognizing/detecting the drive to almost no avail. no searches related directly to the problem i encountered.

i did happen across one page that mentioned it may not be seated into the sata connection well, so i really pinched the f'er hard like a sloper on a v6. surprisingly, it resisted softly. after some trial bootups, it still didnt recognize the seagate. i pointed a flashlight down there and experienced my moment of zen. i saw some bunched up rubber next to the hd's sata connector and realized that it obstructed the hd from seating correctly. i was relieved that it wasnt a problem with the drive. the hard drive slides in along two rubber guides that help absorb vibration and shock to secure the drive. the adhesive lost its grip from trying to force the new drive in and bunched the rubber guides near the connector. after a quick macbook case disassembly, i adjusted the guides, slid the new drive in, and reassembled the case. after booting up via the external drive, it recognized the momentus and asked for initialization! one gyro from tommy's, one Hercules Double IPA by great divide, and one Horn Dog barleywine ale by flying dog later, the macbook is asking me to initialize the new drive. here's a link to what happened.

final note: cloning the original drive to the external via usb 2.0 puttered along at 13mb/s. cloning from the external to the new 7200rpm is humming along at 25mb/s.