Should I erase and replace my former internal hard drive?

Recently my computer started booting slowly, or just hanging during regular activities. If I shut it down, I couldn't always get it to boot up again. When I could boot to my Recovery HD, I ran Disk Utility and repaired both permission and disk errors, but I still had issues with the machine starting up. At a Genius Bar appointment, I was pretty much told point blank that my hard drive had failed, and as it was a non-Apple HD (I'd upgraded to a 750GB Seagate Momentus purchased from Other World Computing), I would have to talk to the reseller and/or manufacturer.
I put the original Apple HD back in and still had issues booting up, but another GB appointment found other errors during a Disk Utility sweep (vs. a logo board error). The Genius seemed to recommend Erase and Installing Lion again, even though after the sweep, everything seemed to boot up fine: it got past the Apple logo/spinning wheel, and it booted onto my desktop without hanging as it had done before.
I have everything current on a different Time Machine drive. The Momentus is now in an external enclosure, and seems to boot fine, but I already submitted a warranty request to Seagate and intend to send it back for a replacement--if I can manage to erase everything on it, first. The original Apple HD doesn't have nearly enough space for me, but I'm making do by trying to get it up-to-date OS wise and with my other software.
My questions are as follows:
Is there a way to verify the "failure" that the first Genius saw on my Momentus drive? Perhaps I can just erase and re-install Lion on that, and get my backup from my Time Machine. It's my understanding that I can't actually boot from a Time Machine backup; I can only restore from it during initial setup, similar to an iCloud backup for an iOS device.
Should I Erase and Install my former Apple HD and try and restore my Time Machine onto that? I wasn't using nearly all of the 750 GB, just about 450. But the original HD was only 500 GB...
If I do end up sending the Momentus back and replacing it with a new one from Seagate, is Erase and Install via Disk Utility to the best way to remove my data from it?
Thanks for your time and assistance!

If you have a time machine back up of your current drive you can do this
Shut down your computer, install the new drive. While the computer is off plug in the external hard drive that you have your time machine back up on. Hold Option key while the computer turnes on, let go of the option key once you get a grey screen. Shortly after you'll see a list of bootable drives, select the one that has your time machine back up on it and boot into that drive.
From there go into disk utility, format your new drive too, osx extended journaled ( I think, double check that, its been awhile since ive had to do this), hit format
Exit disk utility and then you can use time machine to copy all your exisit data to the new hhd and then your pretty much done.
There is also a program called Carbon Cloner that will do esentially the same thing however I've never uesed it.

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Can I clone and transfer from the internal hard drive to an external hard drive ?

I got an intel duo iMac, the machine is very good even if it is almost 3 years old. But with the internal hard drive having 320 Gb I am running out of hard drive space. I have looked into changing the internal hard drive but that involves having to send the machine away to have that done. So I was wondering if I could just transfer all the Mac OS X and all the applications and settings within three user accounts to say a 2 TB external hard drive, and boot from that, using cloning software.
Alternatively, is there a way to transfer the iPhoto and iMovie libraries to an external hard drive. That would free up space. I do not know how, if that is possible, although I have managed that with iTunes. My iMac is running Snow Leopard.
Regards from John5801

John,
USB should be fine for general computer use, but media may add a little too much for the sustained rate that USB2 provides. In a previous career I did a lot of video editing. Firewire was much preferred in that task because of its stability at higher rates. I can see why the SuperDuper! people might suggest it.
When I cloned the wife's iMac, I had replaced the HDD on the MacBook Pro with a USB pocket drive that I've kept the original MacBook's installation mounted on. I've booted directly to that external drive, so you should be okay if you can make the clone across the USB. When I cloned the wife's machine I booted the MacBook Pro with a fresh HDD in Firewire target mode and connected it as an external Firewire 800 drive. Firewire 800 is much faster, but you'll need the cable and everything to be right.
Firewire has a better reputation among people running a lot of media from their drive. I would suggest that you try and get an external drive kit that can support both. I think your iMac supports both firewire 400 AND firewire 800 along with the 3 USB2 ports. I'm guessing based on my wife's 24" imac. The fastest would be the Firewire 800, but that standard is about to be pushed aside in both cases.
Hope that helped.

I'm running Final Cut Express 2. How can I move entire project and application from one internal hard drive to another? Ran out of space on one drive. Thanks.

I'm running Final Cut Express 2. My video project is 95% done and I've run out of space on my 500g internal hard drive. How can I (1) move the complete FCE program and video to my unused 250g internal hard drive and operate it from there and (2) how do I then purge all the FCE info from the 500g drive without losing anything from the 250 drive?
Also, is it possible to change the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 when the project is finished? If so, how? I now know this all should have been done before I started. Thanks for the help.

1. You can't move the application. It must remain on the system drive. Move your capture scratch folder to the external FireWire drive and use the reconnect function in the project.
2. What's the media 16:9 or 4:3?

Can I reformat and partition a new internal hard drive with the Snow Leopard disk?

I'm planning on installing a new internal hard drive in my 15'' Macbook Pro. Can I format and partition the new drive with the Snow Leopard disk or is it just an upgrade from Leopard? Thanks much.

You should be able to do that.
If you want to change the sizes of existing partitions this may help:
Enlarging a partition

How do I replace my old internal hard drive with a new one?

I just ordered a new 1TB hard drive to replace my very small hard drive in my 17" MacBook Pro.
I've looked around at some of the discussions and apparently I need to format the new hard drive first. I am not so great with this techy stuff. Can someone briefly help me and explain exactly how I am supposed to do this? Like I take my old hard drive out first put the new one in.... format it. Take it out put the old one in... somehow copy it... agh confused...
Help? Thanks.

If you have a time machine back up of your current drive you can do this
Shut down your computer, install the new drive. While the computer is off plug in the external hard drive that you have your time machine back up on. Hold Option key while the computer turnes on, let go of the option key once you get a grey screen. Shortly after you'll see a list of bootable drives, select the one that has your time machine back up on it and boot into that drive.
From there go into disk utility, format your new drive too, osx extended journaled ( I think, double check that, its been awhile since ive had to do this), hit format
Exit disk utility and then you can use time machine to copy all your exisit data to the new hhd and then your pretty much done.
There is also a program called Carbon Cloner that will do esentially the same thing however I've never uesed it.

How to copy and replace new Mountain Lion hard drive with old Snow Leopard drive?

So far I have not found an answer to my question, so I am hoping that this is feasible.
A while ago I purchased a used 2010 Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard that did not have the installer disc. A week ago the hardware died on me, so I replaced it with a new 2012 Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion.
The problem is that I purchased a 1 TB aftermarket HD for my old Macbook Pro and want to replace the current smaller hard drive in my new computer with it. I've already run Time Machine and put all of my data in my new computer so I figured that it would be possible to simply copy that disk image back over to my old drive and replace it. However the computer showed that they weren't compatible. When I tried to put my old hard drive in my new computer there was not a bootable OSX available.
Since Mountain Lion already came on my new computer I do not have an installer that I can use.
Is there anyway I can copy the current Mountain Lion information from my new hard drive and basically have a fully functioning, bootable copy on my old hard drive that I can put back into my new computer?
Thank you.

Well, if you put the HDD from the old Mac into an external enclosure you can use a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to clone the Mountain Lion installation onto the 1TB drive. If you go this route, I would suggest you consider using CCC as it does have the option to clone the Repair Partition as well as the boot volume.
Another route you could take would be to put the 1TB drive into the new MBP, and then boot to the Internet Recover . From there you can re-partition the drive and install Mountain Lion clean on the 1TB drive. During the installation process, you will have the option to use the Migration Assistant to migrate your data & apps. You can use your Time Machine backup for that, or if you have the original drive in an enclosure, you can migrate directly from the external drive. I have used this latter method myself a few times.

Updated to 10.4.5 and now my 2nd internal hard drive is missing...help.

I updated to 10.4.5 today with the I tunes 6.0.3. When it finished booting up my 2nd hard drive that holds all my music disappeared. I think the term is didn't mount. I am not computer savy. I have another internal hard drive that did. I used cocktail to repair permirssions and rebooted. I also, went to the apple site and downloaded 10.4.5 combo but still no luck. The hard drive does not show up in disk utilities at all. Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance....
power pc G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5) g4 12: powerbook

All I can tell you from the panic log is that there's a problem either with the video card and/or the video drivers. You might try the following:
Boot from your OS X Installer. Be sure to use the installer for the version of OS X you have installed. After the installer loads select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (or Utilities menu if using Tiger.) After DU loads select your OS X volume from the list on the left, click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer. Now shutdown the computer for a couple of minutes and then restart normally.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior (3.0.3 for Tiger) and/or TechTool Pro (4.1.1 for Tiger) to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
If this doesn't help then visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on kernel panics.

Time machine will not backup to empty external hard drive after replacing Mac's internal hard drive and restoring

First - I live in a tiny fishing village in Belize, so getting support here is virtually non-existent. There is no one else in my village who even uses a Mac. Recently, my hard drive in my 2012 Macbook Pro 13" went bad (said it suffered a "shock"?) and I was traveling to Cozumel, Mexico, so had it replaced there. We used an external hard drive backup to restore the data to it's last time machine backup (October of 2014). Everything was working fine, until I returned home, added some pictures, and wanted to do a fresh backup. Now, time machine will start the backup, but gets about 113,000 of 181,000 done, and it locks up. I can do nothing - everything freezes, and I have to eventually power down the computer. I even tried deleting the old backup from the external hard drive, erasing it completely, and reformatting the external hard drive using disk utility. Still locking up. It is a 5 GB external hard drive, so space shouldn't be an issue, and it was backed up to the same external hard drive previously with no issues. I'm still running Mavericks, and don't want to try to upgrade to Yosemite until I can be sure I have a backup of my old data and pictures. I am a writer, and use that to make my meager living LOL
I'm stumped. I've looked through the files endlessly but can't find anything similar to my issue. Any suggestions? I know just enough to be dangerous, and don't want to lose everything we worked so hard to retrieve when my hard drive crashed last month.
Thanks!

SMH5206 - I tried letting it sit and crank overnight twice. First time I thought it was my error causing it to lock up. Now I know better. I haven't changed any of my time machine settings - and actually never used time machine regularly. Only reason I had a fresh backup from last Oct was because I did one before I upgraded to mavericks. Everything worked fine then - and we used that to restore when the hard drive crashed and was replaced. I have actually deleted hundreds of pictures off my hard drive and one entire user, so it should actually be a much smaller backup - so if it did it before on the same external hard disk, I don't understand why it won't now. I'm really confused.
Kahjot - the external hard drive is the same one I backed up to previously - and I have completely erased it and reformatted, and the information I'm backing up now is less, so there should be no reason why it doesn't have enough room now, when there is actually less information on my current hard drive (see my reply to SMH5206). When I plug it in, it says it is a 500.07 GB WD "My Passport"
I've even tried to have time machine only backup certain files, and not the whole thing. Still locking up.
I'm sure it's my error somewhere, - I just don't know how or where

How should I format and partition my two new hard drives in a 2010 MBP?

My good old mid-2010 13" MBP just lost its stock hard drive. I've decided to keep the laptop, set aside the defunct drive for future data recovery and pop two new drives in the computer along with a 8GB ram upgrade (two 4g ddr3 chips).
The two drives I'm working with now are a 256GB Crucial MX100 SSD (intended for my OS and startup) and an HGST 1TB Travelstar (for apps and storage) that I'm popping into the optical bay [via conversion tray].
I'm putting everything together myself then taking the build to tekserve (or the apple store? which should I go to for OS re-install and formatting help? ) to re-install my original OS (snow leopard) or mountain lion. i cant find my recovery disks and also can't download mountain lion on another comp. to boot my laptop build with.
Is it okay to just throw the drives in myself and let pros format them for me? I know i should be installing the OS myself but all of my workaround options are fleeting due to time constraints... gotta get my OG setup up and running.
Thanks everyone.

sageakash,
I have the same model MacBook Pro as you. If the 1 TB Travelstar HDD is a SATA III disk, then you might have trouble with it in the optical bay due to the connecting cable. To minimize problems, put a SATA II disk rather than a SATA III disk into the optical bay.
If you want your MacBook Pro’s original iLife apps to be installed on your new disks, then you’ll need to have Snow Leopard installed first, even if your target OS is Mountain Lion; they can’t be subsequently installed from the grey Applications Install DVD once a newer version of OS X is on your boot volume.
What is your concern with pros formatting your disks? What’s “OG”?

My music won't sync to my iPhone 4s after it got completely erased and then my computer's hard drive crashed.

I was updating to iOS6 and I accidentally knocked out my USB hub when I was moving the printer cable. My iPhone cord, which was in the USB hub, obviously got disconnected. I found out the hard way that I had to format my phone, or it would just be a really expensive paperweight. I did.
A couple days later, I added all of my country music back onto my phone just so I had something to listen to. I listen to a wide variety of music, however, so that was just a small portion of my library. A week and one day after the operating system incident, I got the good ol blue screen. I'm used to them, even though my laptop was purchased in May 2011 and I shouldn't have to be used to them, so I just tried to fix it, to no avail. After running the Dell diagnostics, I was greeted with "Hey! You're hard drive is done!" in computer speak. Numerous expletives later, I booted my computer into safe mode and manually copied all of my files to my terabyte external hard drive.
I've got my computer back now and I copied my files back onto my computer. They're all in iTunes, but I can't click and drag them onto my phone. When I drag the songs, the icon has the number of songs and the circle with a slash through it. I'm not technically incompetent...so I'm thinking that Apple is so afraid that I'm going to steal the music I paid for that they're not allowing me to move it back to my phone. If someone were to prove me wrong and solve my problem, I'd actually be a really happy camper. So.....anyone?
Thanks!!!!!
A

I solved my own question. So for anyone else who has this problem, here's what to do.
1. Plug in your iPhone. Sync it with the computer.
2. Click on your phone in the sidebar and click on your phone's music tab on the top right.
3. Select that you'd like to sync music from this library.
4. Select what you want to sync. Yes, it will delete the current music off of the phone but if you've imported that into your new library, then you'll just put it right back on. Your phone currently thinks it's supposed to sync with the hard drive that doesn't exist, so that's the problem.
5. Press apply, then press sync (lower right).
6. It should sync everything....I hope....That's what it looks like it's doing.
7. Never accidentally unplug your phone during an update again.
8. Hope to whatever god you pray to that your hard drive doesn't crash again.
9. Enjoy your day

Erasing and reinstalling my mac pro hard drive

I have an older Mac Pro (2006 I think).
I want to erase and reinstall the hard drive. Once the disk is clean, is there a way to install OS directly to mountain lion? Or will I have to install from an ealier complete set of physical disks?

If it shipped with 10.4 and is a 2007 or earlier Mountain Lion is not supported, only up to Lion.
You download and save the Lion installer first and would need to have 10.6.8 to access the App Store.
Leave what you have as is, and just install a new system to another of the drive bays.

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009) - Maximum internal hard drive size and speed?

What is the maximum size of hard drive and speed for an internal hard drive to my Macbook Pro (13 inch, Mid 2009), please?
I bought myself a Technics 1TB, 7200 rpm internal hardrive. Made a clone successfully in Super Duper.
It fits, but It is not available for starting up my Macbook Pro. Not available in System Prefs, but visible and grey in Disc Utility.
Although it starts up my Mac Pro just fine.. but not my Macbook Pro.
Is there a limit of hard drive specifics?
What is the maximum size of hard drive and speed for an internal hard drive to my Macbook Pro (13 inch, Mid 2009), please?

Thanks for the reply
I cloned the Technics HDD ( 2,5" HGST Travelstar 7K1000 - 1 TB : HTS721010A9E630) from the MBP.
I tried to boot it up with my Technincs ( 2,5" HGST Travelstar 7K1000 - 1 TB : HTS721010A9E630) installed in my MBP (as my internal hard drive).

Installing new internal hard drive. How do I safely clone my existing BOOTCAMP partition?

I have a 13 inch Aluminum Late 2008 MacBook. Processor 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4 (11E53). Currently I have a 160 GB SATA disk as my hard drive a d 4 GB of memory. (Is it time to upgrade or what?) I recently bought a Western Digital 1 TB internal hard drive to replace my exisiting internal hard drive. I spent a lot of time last night trying to first- connect this new hard drive to my computer so that I can then clone the existing hard drive and then hoping that I would get that done so I could install the new hard drive. No such luck.
My current hard drive is partitioned as follows:
Name: Macintosh HD
Format: Mac OS Extended (journaled)
Size: 132.5 GB
Name: BOOTCAMP
Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS)
Size: 26.69 GB
When I was partitioning the new drive I did so as follows:
Name: Macintosh HD
Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Size: 973.51 GB
Name: BOOTCAMP
Format: MS-DOS (FAT) --- This was the only option that I was given that I thought would work. I did not have the option of "Windows NT File System (NTFS) to choose from. Question # 1: is that going to be a problem? I only run 1 program on Windows and that is the only reason I have BOOTCAMP on there at all. However, I do HAVE to have that program. Like I said it didn't give me the option to choose Windows so I didn't know where to go with this. Any help with that would be awesome.
Size: 26.34 GB (I just used the same size that was current, or close to it.)
I connected the Western Digital 1 TB through an external device, partitioned it as stated above, and then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drives. The first one went through fine. (It took 2 hours and I went to bed before it finished.) This morning I woke to see that it had gone through well. I then started the process with the BOOTCAMP drives. However, before I started it gave me errors stating that I wouldn't be able to run Windows off of the Cloned BOOTCAMP drive. Question #2: Is it because of the Format type I chose when partitioning? Or something else? I am unsure where to go from here. I would really appreciate any help that is out there. I would love to get this new drive installed ASAP. Thank you so much in advance!

Well yes and no. I succeeded with the clone. All of the information seems to be there. However, it isn't showing in the system preferences - start up disk -- as a start up disk option. Therefore I assume it didn't clone correctly, or at least not in a way to use it the way I was. I am thinking it may be a better idea to just run Parallels or a similar software program. I rarely use the software that has to run in Windows. And maybe that will be the easiest way. I think I will still have to change the way I have it because I assume if it isn't running as it was before now I must have done something wrong.
I am unsure of where to go from here. But know that I really do appreciate your help.

Boot from FireWire External Drive WITHOUT mounting internal Hard Drive

Is it possible too boot a PowerBook G4 over FireWire (this part works) WITHOUT mounting the internal hard drive at boot time - i.e. never mount the internal hard drive when booting from FireWire?
There is an Oreilly article at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/h/341 which discusses using "niutil" but it is not clear how to indicate the internal hard drive should not be mounted.
The boot from FireWire works fine but how do you tell Mac OS X to ignore and never mount the internal hard drive? There used to be an /etc/fstab file where you could specify drives to mount. The /etc/fstab.hd file comments now say "IGNORE THIS FILE.
This file does nothing, contains no useful data, and might go away in
future releases. Do not depend on this file or its contents."
Thanks,

That is not the problem - I have been using the startup manager by holding down the option key during boot-up. I am having no problem getting the PowerBook to boot from the FireWire Drive.
*The Problem* is that after the PowerBook has booted from the exernal FireWire drive, I still see the internal hard drive of the PowerBook on the desktop. I do not want this. Some key points to note:
[1] I can unmount the interal hard drive and remove from the desktop only by using the Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilities folder. There is a button there to "unmount selected volume"
[2] The finder does not have an icon next to the internal hard drive icon to allow the internal hard drive to be unmounted when booted from a FireWire drive
[3] I want the MacOS X kernel to be configured to not automount any hard drive volumes at bootup - this used to be possible by editing the /etc/fstab.hd file but that file does not appear to be used any more per the commennts in the file.
**Remaining Question** How do you configure the MacOS X kernel to prevent it from mounting any other hard drive at boot time? I do not want to use methods [1] or [2]
Thanks

Can I still take files off my current (corrupt) internal hard drive if I boot off an external?

Ok, here's what happened...
My MacBook Pro (2009 I think) suddenly started freezing recently. It would freeze for 10-15mins then work for 2 then freeze again. I opened the disc utility and attempted to verify disc- it failed and told me to restart and hold cmd+R which I did. From here I tried to scan the disc again, it told me to repair the disc. The repair failed.
Now, I have a TM backup from a month ago, but I've done a lot of writing in the last month that I'm desperate to keep. I tried restarting it again with the hope that even if it keeps freezing, I'll be able to get my work off before doing a system restore, but now it turns itself off before loading up.
I have the crazy idea that if I go onto the boot disc utility and download mavericks to a flash pen, then I could boot up off that and hopefully access my internal hard drive from within. Then I could find the work, email it to another location and TM restore the whole shebang. Is this even possible?!
It's currently downloading / installing mavericks on the flash pen.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
Desperate writer,
Jon

No. It is not an archival backup. It essentially is a mirror of what is on your hard drive. However, it will not delete those backups until it needs the space.
If you wish to archive them to other storage, you need to use something else (copying in Finder to an external would suffice).

Should I erase and replace my former internal hard drive?

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