The cause of all my trouble? This small part.Īpple’s most recent devices are particularly hard to repair, in large part because the company has taken to making tradeoffs in order to make its computers as small, light, and power efficient as possible. Fix it yourselfĬomputer repair is becoming more and more of a rarefied skill these days, thanks to smaller and smaller components many of us are also understandably squeamish about taking apart the devices on which we depend every day. Thanks to the restore, my computer’s back to full functionality, and I can pick up pretty much seamlessly from where I left off-hopefully with a more reliable drive. (I re-downloaded the Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store.) Ten minutes or so later, and I was able to re-enable FileVault with no problems.

As it suggests, it can create a brand new partition on your startup disk or an external disk, as long as you have an OS X installer handy. A little further searching led me to Christopher Silvertooth’s handy AppleScript utility,

SuperDuper, from Shirt Pocket, is an invaluable tool for making a bootable backup of your Mac-yes, even if you already have Time Machine set up.Ī trip to Google turned up the culprit: Because I’d formatted the new SSD from scratch, it didn’t contain OS X’s Recovery Partition, which is required for FileVault. (I first tried to restore using Disk Utility, but it gave me grief because my 1TB backup disk was larger than my 120GB SSD.) The one problem I ran into was that FileVault was not enabled on the new SSD, and when I went to activate it, OS X gave me an error saying that FileVault couldn’t be turned on for my disk. Restoring from SuperDuper worked a treat. New SSD installed and case re-attached, I booted the Mac up from my SuperDuper backup and set about restoring my old system, with fingers crossed. (One thing I later wished I’d had handy: a can of compressed air, to disperse some of the dust that had accumulated inside the case.) Surprisingly compact, right?įollowing iFixit’s instructions made the process pretty painless: The only real worrying moments are unplugging connectors from the logic board-that’s the point when one false move could land you in much hotter water than you’re already in.īut all told, the whole process from start to finish took only about 20 minutes-and part of that was retrieving scissors from the other room when I realized I couldn’t rip open the anti-static bag the new SSD came in. The MacBook Air, mid-surgery, its delicate innards exposed to the world.

Replacement ssd drive for macbook air