Need help buying new hard drive

I have a macbook that needs a new hard drive and need help knowing what hard drives to buy that will be compatible with it. It is a macbook pro 17inch model no: A1297.
Any help would be appreciated, Thanks

Any 2.5" diameter, 9.5mm thick SATA drive will be compatible. Currently they come up to 1.5 TB in capacity. I have a 1 TB Seagate SSHD (hybrid) drive installed in my primary MBP. The cost is a modest premium over a conventional HDD of the same capacity. Boot and shutdown times are significantly faster when compared to a conventional HDD, I can recommend this as an option.
If the bank account permits, an SSD will produce the overall maximum performance gains. Boot, shutdown and resource hungry applications will be noticeably faster. Casualyll use such as e-mails and text editing will produce no meaningful performance differences compared to a conventional HDD.
I am of the opinion that the cost premium is still too high for the benefits that they afford. Other have different views.
Ciao.

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Need to buy new hard drive for my 17 iMac G5 pre-isight

I need to get a new hard drive for my imac g5. I went to staples and picked up a maxtor sata hd but the screws aren't in the correct place as the original HD. Does anyone know the exact HD that came with the computer and where I can purchase one?
Best,
Ken

I think I figured it out. The reason why the screws aren't in the right place is because the original HD that comes with the computer has an external housing around it. I think what I need to do is just take that housing off and put it on the new HD that I purchase.

Novice needs help installing new hard drive

I have a macbook and purchased a new hard drive after my current hard drive failed. I can remove the battery, unscrew the 3 screws, install the new hd. What are the steps that follow to bring my machine up to being back to normal? Let's approach this with "color by numbers" type instruction. Thanks

Bama--
You score points for guts. Novice changing HDD is not one I see often. You also lose points for not getting directions first before starting. (I work in education, and thus grade a lot of work and exams.)
As this is an open book/open note exam for you, best you look here: http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/MacBook13inch_HardDriveDIY.pdf. If this is not your MacBook, then we'll need just a bit more info to steer you in the right direction.
There is no time limit on this exam.
Best of luck--
Doc

Need help installing new hard drive and wiping the old one for Windows XP.

I’ve searched to try and figure out the answer to my question and haven’t been too successful, so hopefully someone can help me out. I have a new Mac Pro that I haven’t even turned it on yet because I’m waiting for some upgrades to show up. Here is what I plan to do, I’m unsure of what I need to do and what order to do it in:
It has a stock 250GB hard drive that I plan to wipe and install Windows XP on. I have a new 750GB drive coming that will run Leopard which will be my primary OS. Once I have this set up, I will probably try running VM Fusion which I assume I can install later on. Here are my questions:
When I put my new blank 750GB drive in to install Leopard, will OS X boot up off the Leopard install disc to then allow me to do the install?
When do I wipe the smaller drive to put Windows on it, before or after I’ve installed Leopard on the new drive? How should I wipe it, using the Bootcamp setup assistant or Disc Utility? If I wipe it after installing Leopard, will I be prompted for which drive to boot from?
Thanks in advance for any help.

I don't use Windows, but I think the proper order to do things would be this:
First, if your Mac Pro came with Tiger installed, when you start it up for the first time, you'll need to go through some initial setup, create an administrator account, etc. You can go ahead and do this.
Afterwards, you can install your 750 GB drive. Next, you can insert your Leopard disk, and go to System Preferences/Startup Disk to choose to start up from the disk. (Alternatively, if you just choose "Install Mac OS X" from the disk, it will instruct you to restart the mac.)
When the mac boots from the disc, install Leopard on your 750. Once you have that done, and have booted from that drive, you'll be able to erase your 250 in Disk Utility, and then install Windows on it.

In need of a new hard drive for my old G5 computer

Hello there, I'm not as savvy as you are with computers but I am in need of a new hard drive for my old G5 computer that my husband uses. His crashed. If you did it all over again would you buy the same new hard drive? If so, where did you buy it? I don't even know where to start and was SO happy to find this recent post on installing new drives into the G5. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you!
<Title Edited by Host>

I actually just ran across this hard drive oddity for the first time myself just yesterday. It seems that some older Macs may not be able to use the newest SATA interfaces on some hard drives.
I an attempt to not get overly technical, SATA is the current interface type on computer hard drives. You can get some additional information from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA. There are currently three revisions, SATA-1 (the oldest), SATA-2 (the current version), & SATA-3 (the latest and greatest).
So what happened was that my G5 could not use the SATA-3 drive I purchased because the computer could not support the SATA-3 standard. It was possible to "slow down" one of the other test SATA-3 drives to make it work like a SATA-2 and so it may be possible to do the same to other hard drives.
To answer your question, I would NOT purchase the saem hard drive for my Mac as it does not work for this older Mac.
My suggestion, if you can find one purchase the same hard drive that was in the computer. That way you know it is compatible. If you would like to upgrade, you will have to do some looking. Although I cannot recommend a specific drive, my two favorite companies are Seagate, www.seagate.com and Western Digitial, www.wdc.com. You most likely have a 3.5" drive, if you have a desktop, 2.5" for a laptop. WD has the Cavier line and Seagate has either Barrcuda or Momentus. What you are looking for is capacity.
So, both Seagate and Western Digital are good. You need a 3.5" drive for a desktop or 2.5" drive for a laptop. Stick with a SATA-2 drive also known as a SATA 3Gb/s drive for compatibility. Get a drive that is 7200 RPM or higher. Finally purchase the largest capacity at you can afford. Amazon is a good general place to been looking.
KWCitizen_Apple

Need help reformatting my hard drive for mac only

Help please
Need help reformatting my hard drive for mac only with my toshishba hard drive

What Mac is this please, with what version of OS X?

Help with new hard drive and data recovery

I have a macbook pro 13" from early 2011...last week the hard drive crashed and after a few hours at the genius bar had to got tekserv to recover my data and get a new hard drive and update to 8GB of Ram. When I got my macbook back I was given an external hard drive that had everything from my old hard drive saved by the users on the old hard drive. I was hoping I could just transfer the user over to the new hard drive but since I had to restart the computer as a new computer I am not able to just reassign my old profile as the new one on this laptop. Maybe I've done something wrong but at this point I transferred all my documents over, moved my music and pictures over but I have a few things I can't figure out that I'm hoping someone can help with.
1. Do emails that were in my mail program from both gmail and my verizon.net program get saved somewhere or do I have to just assume those were lost?
2. my iTunes library is now there but none of my playlists are there. Should those have been saved somewhere in my iTunes folder that I should see them? I'm concerned about syncing my iPhone or iPads to iTunes without those there.
thanks for the help.

Here's the spec page on your PB. http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g4/stats/powerbook_g4_1.25_15.ht ml It came with OS 10.2.7 installed. The max OS is Leopard 10.5.x
Tiger install DVDs are in short supply. Tiger is no longer available at the Apple Store but may be available for $129 by calling Apple Phone Sales @ 1-800-MY-APPLE (1-800-692-7753). For other sources, do a Google search for MA453Z/A (10.4.6), MA190Z/A (10.4.3) and M9639Z/A (10.4). Also look on eBay. Be sure & buy a retail version (black with silver X) and not a model specific version (gray) (See http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1976068 Can I use another Mac's system restore disc on my Mac?.
Also check these web stores: http://www.lacomputercompany.com/cgi-bin/rpcart/index.cgi?command=dispitem&type= sku&sku=19521 http://www.allmac.com/shop/index.php?cPath=5_10003
After you install the base 10.4.x, update to the final Tiger version 10.4.11. Here's the link for the 10.4.11 combo update http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24901?viewlocale=en_US
Look at this link Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger Installing Software Support Page
http://www.apple.com/support/tiger/install/
You can also download the Tiger Installation and Setup Guide
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Tiger_Install_Setup_Guide.pdf
 Cheers, Tom

Need help with replacement hard drive

My hard drive has stopped working on this computer and since i only purchased it on 10/2012 I really don't want to replace it just yet. I am trying to buy a new hard drive but I would like a Seagate. I want to upgrade from 1 TB to 2TB. I was wondering if there is a Seagate product out there that would be compatable with the original hard drive but in 2 TB.The original hard drive is a HDD GNRC 1 TB SATA 3 ECO 7200 rpm 3.5". I was looking at a Seagate 2TB SATA 6.0 but I do not know is the SATA 6 will work with the original SATA 3. Can you please help me or guide me in the right direction for a replacement. I also have the HP recovery CD's coming to me in the mail.Thanks,GinaCee

Hi Big_Dave,Thank you for your help. I found this hard drive at Newegg and I was hoping you could tell me if it would be compatable.Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive. Or is there any Seagate product you could reccomend? I have a Seagate external hard drive and I like thier product, so I was hoping that they made something compatable for my HP. I will be installing this drive myself. I have all the instructions from the HP website and it doesn't look that difficult. Just waiting for my restore CD's and a replacement hard drive so I can start this project. Thanks again!Gina

Tips on buying new hard drive?

I'd like to install a new hard drive in my 800 mhz iMac G4, but I don't really know enough about hard drives to know what to buy. Would any internal hard drive work with my Mac or do I need to get a specific type of hard drive? Thanks.

Hello,
The iMac uses a standard desktop PC hard drive. It is 3.5" wide and in the iMac G4 uses the IDE connection (also known as ATA or Parallel ATA, ATA 66, etc) but not the SATA (serial ATA) connection as this is different. You should buy a 7,200rpm drive as these are faster than the 5,400rpm drive that came in the iMac 800MHz. You should also look for one with a cache of 8Mb or higher as this also increases the speed.
I've heard mixed reports from 800MHz iMac owners; some are limited to the 128Gb IDE limit found on older IDE Controllers and others are not. I'd advise sticking to a 120Gb internal drive to avoid disappointment. There is essentially no limit to the size of drive you can connect externally via Firewire.
Here is a list of suitable hard drives.
It's pretty fiddly to work inside an iMac G4 so you must be cautious. Always take anti-static precautions. Here are three options for guiding you through the procedure:
MacWorld
xlr8yourmac
Service Manuals
I've also taken a fair few photos which you can find here.
I'd advise reading the reports on the xlr8yourmac's drive database so get other people's experiences first.
You must replace the Thermal Paste when you close the iMac up or it will overheat.
It's probably worth replacing the PRAM Battery whilst you're in there as these have a finite life (once they fail to re-charge you may start to run in to snags - it's only a $5 part). You might also give consideration to upgrading the 'factory' RAM slot.
regards
mrtotes

Help restore new hard drive via time machine back up in time capsule

I have followed Pondini's How Do I Restore My Entire System from a backup on Time Capsule. I get all the way to section G with No Problem. I get to section H and my new Hard Drive does not appear in the Select a Destination box. The icon indicating the system is calculating the size of the volume keeps moving. Finally it stops searching/calculating and just offers the button "go back". For some reason it doesnt recognize my new HD. I open Disk Utility and perform a check and the hard drive appears to be working fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Are you sure you formatted the new drive properly, per section (c) there?
If that's not right, you can't install OSX on it.

Need to add new hard drive. What type do I need?

I am adding a new hard drive for my Mac Pro. Got it last year. I am looking at 2 hard drives my Seagate.
750 GB 3.5 SATA II NCQ Internal HD
750 GB 3.5 Ultra ATA/ 100 Internal HD.
Which of the 2 will work in my computer?
Thanks in advance for the help.
- Dan

There have been problems with older Seagate 7200.10s but not .11s but they must be SATA. It really is there in the Do It Yourself mini booklet and pdf manual, or look at the specs and slots.
The Seagates were slow and there was a firmware update for some models.

Help with new hard drive

Only a select few of us have found ourselves in this position. I am a student who takes his laptop to school for learning purposes however after doing a long night as the sound technician at a school show I put my MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 13" 4GB RAM Intel Core i5) into my bag put it over my shoulder and started to walk when I felt like a sudden weight had been lifted off my back and I heard the most colossal bang as then I find that the bag has snapped and my MacBook Pro is on the floor. When I get home I hastily go and check it and I find that there is a sizable dent in the side of my laptop where the hard drive is, so I open it up the hard drive and the SATA connection are fine and my mac still works so I continue to take it to school when a couple of days ago it completely freezes up and refuses to do anything so I turn it off and wait till I get home and then boot it up and all I get is a white screen so I press command and R. I then get I dialogue saying "INTERNET RECOVERY PLEASE WAIT", I read up on internet recovery and find it means something has gone completely wrong with my system. My hard drive has broke. So I go to school and they give me a small 60 GB hard drive spinning at 3,200 RPM which gave me some time to look for anew hard drive online whilst I could still do work on my laptop. I then find a Seagate 1 TB SSHD for £70 on Amazon so I go for it. Now I have followed all the instructions on how to install the drive which is supposedly Mac compatible I then boot my MacBook Pro up holding command and r it then boots into internet recovery I then go to restore the system through Time Machine Back-Up to then find that the SSHD isn't recognized. So I take it out and put it in my now 12 Year Old Power Mac G5 and in registers fine I then formatted it to Mac OS X Extended Journaled and partition it as GUID Partition Map for Intel Macs. I re-insert it into my MacBook Pro and go through the process again however it is still not showing up.
My Question is...
Am I doing something wrong?
Or
Is it the Solid State Hybrid Drive?
I can't Plug the new hard drive in via a SATA to USB and install Mac OS X Yosemite and my files because the only medium that has all my files on is my External Hard drive for time machine back-up.
Any help would be greatly appreciated

"It also seems a bit backwards since you have to erase a hard drive with nothing on it to format it"
At least you are not erasing anything important!! Always worth reformatting a new HD in my opinion, Apple does not make the HDs so you never know what they may have been formatted as/with/on/by etc... Also if you take time to ZERO out any data (see security options button) you would identify/isolate any bad blocks before you start using (highly recommended). This would lead to far few problems later, as you know for sure you have a sound and working disk! Definitely NOT backwards! Just good sense.

Help With New Hard Drive Installation Recovery

I had a bad hard drive crash. I installed a new one and got the bios to boot from the cd drive, with the windows 7
orginal install cd in the drive. It recognized Drive 0, I clicked new in the options. It created ONE System partition.
Installed windows 7 seemingly fine. Inserted the application and driver recovery disk and installed those. It all seemed fine. This morning I turned it on and it the hard drive error message (3F0) please install an operating system. I shut it down and restarted, it seemed normal. I installed a few programs, shut it down again. Returned to it later, started it up again and it took me to the diagnostic screen telling me SMART Check - Not Installed and Short DST - Not Installed.. Can someone tell me how to delete that partition and I can format the drive in a usb sata enclosure and start over again.
Please tell me the correct proceedure to get this laptop back up and running to a factory state. I have original Windows7 and Windows8 and Application and Driver disks for both OS'es.. I want to stay with the Windows7 installation.
Thanks for any help with this problem. I have no idea where I went wrong !
This question was solved.
View Solution.

It is not impossible that the new hard drive is bad, have seen it before. It is also possible that the sata controller on motherboard is bad-but I would look at that possibilty last. Can you get an exchange on the new hdd?
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**Click Accept as Solution on a Reply that solves your issue to help others**

Help Restoring New Hard Drive from Time Machine

To replace a failing Macintosh HD, I created an OS X Mountain Lion boot disk on a flash drive, put my new hard drive in a USB external dock, booted to the flash drive, partitioned and formatted the new drive (selecting GUID partition), and have tried and failed three times to restore from Time Machine, which is on a Firewire-connected drive. The error I get is that it's unable to create a restore disk.
I could reformat the new drive and try again, but is there something else I'm missing? For example, should I have left the new drive in the external dock, or should I move it to bay 1 and then try to restore, considering that latency is a possible issue or that Time Machine won't restore to a USB drive?

Why don't you install ML on it and then see?
Better yet use any of the 4 internal drive bays instead of USB - slow and terrrible place!
It does not matter where or what drive bay.
Unable to unmount drive.
CLONE your system - a couple times, pure Apple Mac OS once you have one and later for working copy and one before you install or apply updates or programs or otehr changes.
CCC carbon copy cloner - will create recovery partition when you clone a system.
I assume your flash drive works, not everyone is successful first shot.
I prefer a clean install to start with. Esp as you say your system was failing I don't like relying on the Time Machine for everything.

New to the forums, not new to Mac. Need help on failing hard drive.

Hello, glad to have found this forum...I need all the help I can get. Let me explain what I have, what it's doing, what I want it to do, what I "think" I need to do.
*What I have:*
733 G4 with superdrive, 512 MB SDRAM, 40 & 60 gig internal original hard drives
*What it is doing:*
For about a year one of the drives (seems to be my 60g start-up drive) has made clicking/popping noises not unlike when you click/cluck your tongue. I've ignored it, foolishly, and gone about my business. Then I began having to click the mouse and punch keys when I start-up in order to get the drive to begin spinning, otherwise it would never kick in and I'd get the "?" face. Anyway, I have been living like that for many months until recently when my start-up drive only had about 500MB left of space, I burned some DVD's and freed up about 6 gig on the drive for some cushion the other day. Well, since doing that, when I start up now I get a spinning globe. I have to hold the option key down at boot and then select the drive manually and I'm back to being fine again.
*What I want it to do:*
I'm freaked out about losing data because I am a photographer and graphic designer, so I would die if I lost any files. I have been using one of my old iPods as a back up drive to dump data on and burning some DVD's too...but still, I have most of my life still on the drive. Here is what I am considering. I would like to get an external drive to move and continue to grow my massive files for my work and creativity. I'm thinking the G-Tech 320 Quad external would be a good fit. Now, moving back inside, my 60g start-up is telling me it's failing and to back up and replace before...well, you know. My 2nd internal drive is 40g and is strictly my iTunes library of MP3s.
How do I save myself and replace my start-up drive?
Do I buy the G-Tech first, move all my files over, then replace the internal, failing 60g? Can I start-up from the G-Tech? Should I/Can I make my 40g the temporary start-up, replace the failing 60g, and go from there? How should I do this and must I get the G-Tech now?
While on this same question, I am getting conflicting information regarding how much my 733 G4 will recognize as far as each drive size. What is the max size each drive can be? What is the max combined?
*What I think I should do:*
I think I should buy the G-Tech, move my life over there, then use the working 40g as my start-up, replace the failing 60g with the largest possible when possible, make the replacement internal the start-up again, use or replace the working/existing 40g as storage/back-up, live happily ever after.
*And on a side note:*
I plan to drop two sticks of 512MB memory, this filling it up to it's max 1.5 gig of memory. Will this have a noticeable affect on my computer? If so, how?
Oh, and the reason I was opting for the Quad G-Tech is because can't I upgrade and add FW800 ports to my G4 rather easily?
Thank you for any time or effort you give me in helping me through this urgent matter. I had run out of places to go and people to ask before running across this forum.

First of all I cannot believe you have no backup strategy and only start to worry about it after problems arise. You're an accident waiting to happen. Before you consider anything make backups.
Basic Backup
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
You can begin addressing the problems with your hard drive(s) after you get your stuff properly backed up. Once that's done get two larger drives for the computer and replace the small ones you now have. Your model should support hard drives up to 128 GBs in size. There is not specific limit on external drives so your external backup drive can be large enough to be partitioned into multiple volumes large enough to backup at least one of the internal drives (using the second internal drive as a backup for the first internal drive. This provides redundancy - an internal and an external backup.) You can then use the additional space on the external drive for your data files.
BTW, you risk catastrophic data loss by allowing the free space on your startup volume to drop below 3 GBs.

Need help buying new hard drive

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