Mac laptops forum: MacBook hard drive upgrade

Total posts: 13 (Showing page 1 of 1)

Thread display preference:
Collapsed
Expanded

Back to Mac laptops

Tracked Track this thread

Answers

Answer Best answer as chosen by user leoleann55

A couple of ways to achieve this,

by mrmacfixit - 6/13/12 6:11 PM

In Reply to: MacBook hard drive upgrade by leoleann55

1. Purchase an external enclosure to hold the drive that you are about to remove from the MBP. USB or Firewire, it makes no difference.
OR
2. A USB SATA dock which will allow you to plug your old drive into it, they usually accept full size drives and the smaller laptop type, but not at the same time.

With either solution, remove the old drive, install the new one, initialize, install OS X, do the updates and then connect your solution of choice to the MBP.
The drive will mount on the desktop and allow you to transfer what you need to the new drive.

P

Was this reply helpful? (1) (0)

Staff pick

Thanks, but....

by leoleann55 - 6/14/12 8:12 AM

In Reply to: A couple of ways to achieve this, by mrmacfixit

How can I get OSX lion onto my new hard drive? Can I get it on a CD?

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick

Out of curiosity.

by R. Proffitt - 6/14/12 8:14 AM

In Reply to: Thanks, but.... by leoleann55

What country are you in? Here I've been in the US, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan and parts of Asia and the OSX DVD is pretty available at any Apple store or online.
Bob

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick

Im in the US

by leoleann55 - 6/14/12 9:07 AM

In Reply to: Out of curiosity. by R. Proffitt

Ok I will have to look!

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick

Check out this article from Apple,

by mrmacfixit - 6/15/12 6:25 AM

In Reply to: Thanks, but.... by leoleann55

if shows that you can boot directly from the Apple servers via the internet.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

There should also be a Recovery Disk that came with the computer

P

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick

If the unit shipped with 10.7

by Jimmy Greystone - 6/15/12 8:14 AM

In Reply to: Check out this article from Apple, by mrmacfixit

If the unit shipped with 10.7, then it will not have any recovery media bundled with it. The Early 2011s straddled the 10.6-10.7 divide, so some will, some won't. Late 2011s and later will not have any restore media, just the recovery partition. Which kind of sucks if you're replacing the HDD, but you can buy a sort of bootstrap thumb drive from Apple to get around that.

Mildly ironic in a way, that right around the time ISPs all over start implementing bandwidth caps to avoid having to invest in increasing capacity, more and more companies seem to be moving to a digital distribution model, like Apple's download-only system for Mac OS X 10.7+ and iOS. Never mind the fact that in the US around half of people still only have dialup connections.

Was this reply helpful? (1) (0)

Staff pick

The link would indicate that

by mrmacfixit - 6/16/12 1:18 PM

In Reply to: If the unit shipped with 10.7 by Jimmy Greystone

after changing out the HDD, it is possible to boot directly from "apple servers" somewhere.

Networking built into some ROM on the board?

Never tried it but sounds interesting

P

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick

Yes

by Jimmy Greystone - 6/16/12 6:35 PM

In Reply to: The link would indicate that by mrmacfixit

Yes, it would appear to be a form of netbooting, probably with a hardcoded set of IP addresses or some such. From what it describes, it basically just netboots the recovery image, so that's at least something. Still won't help you a lot if you're on dialup or some other kind of Internet connection, but it's at least a start.

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick

true,

by mrmacfixit - 6/17/12 7:01 AM

In Reply to: Yes by Jimmy Greystone

it must be really difficult to be a Mac user on dial up.

Come to that, any type of computer updating would be a pain on Dial UP

P

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick

Thanks for all the response!

by leoleann55 - 6/17/12 4:11 PM

In Reply to: true, by mrmacfixit

Ya dial-up would be hard, I have 5mbps down so it should be ok.

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick

Try copying the hard drive first

by onemoremile - 6/22/12 10:54 PM

In Reply to: Thanks, but.... by leoleann55

Leoleann: The way I did this was to install the new hard drive in the external exposure, load Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/) onto the old hard drive and clone the old hard drive onto the new one. When I installed the new hard drive in the laptop, it booted up just as it always had. The system looked the same, except it had far more free disk space!

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick

Answer Best answer as chosen by user leoleann55

Carbon Copy Cloner is the way to go...

by mariohummer - 6/23/12 1:34 PM

In Reply to: MacBook hard drive upgrade by leoleann55

Leoleann,

Even though you seem to have reached a verdict, and even if you already solved your problem, I'd strongly suggest you get a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner & install it in your current internal drive, old or new. Like onemoremille, it's the best solution, even for your everyday backups or clones.

If you still have the old HD in your Mac:
- install CCC
- clone your internal drive to an external drive, either an USB or Firewire one
- install your new HD in your Mac
- boot from your external drive and use CCC to clone back your external HD to your new, internal one.

If you got your new internal HD up and running already, then use CCC to daily clone your internal HD to your external drive of choice; you can program CCC to do that at a given time of the day and with the periodicity of your choice actually. Every once in a while, after cloning, boot from the external HD to verify that you can boot from it safely.

Good luck.

Was this reply helpful? (0) (0)

Staff pick