Swapping Hard Drive to SSD

Hi Everyone,
My macbook 13" 5,5 hard drive recently went out, and it would freeze and give me the wheel everytime i use it for more than 15 minutes. I went out and bought a samsung SSD and replaced it. When it came to installing the OS, I didn't have the original mac OS discs, so I borrowed it from a friend of mine. Every time i try to boot it up with the disc, the screen would pop up and ask me if i want to restore to back up, or restart. Can anyone tell me what's wrong here ? I can't restore to backup, because I didn't back up anything in the first place so that's not an option, and everytime i restart it obvisly would bring me back to the same screen, and all i want is to boot the OS from scratch.
Thanks !

The Snow Leopard retail disk will work.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard
Ciao.

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Swapping Hard Drive problem

Hello, I have a 2008 model Macbook pro. I recently pulled the hard drive from a windows pc and replaced that drive with a SSD. The windows drive was not reformatted, I figured I could do it through Disk Utility. However, the drive does not show up. I'm assuming it's currently formatted as ntfs or fat32.
The existing drive is bootable, but the machine is put back together and it's a pain to take apart. Wondering if I can boot into something like terminal and choose to reformat the drive.
The only drive that shows up is my bootable flash drive. I do have the ability to hook up the old drive through a USB to SATA adapter, and possibly boot that way. If I can get it to boot from that external drive, is there a way to format the newly installed drive without having to rip the whole thing a part?
I had a hard time with the * shaped screws getting them in and out, so I'm trying to avoid having to remove the drive again....
Any tips would be appreciated!

More info: I think there is something wrong on the motherboard side all of a sudden. Now when I put the original drive in it doesn't boot up anymore. I wonder if while removing the old drive, I damaged the Hard Drive Connector? I just ordered a replacement on ebay (only 9 bucks). What is odd is I'm pretty careful about removing things, since I have replaced many laptop components over the years, so I don't think I did anything damaging when swapping hard drives.
The laptop did work fine, but since it is a 5400 RPM drive, I wanted speed, so I wanted to just put a 7200 RPM or SSD. What I ended up doing this morning was to hook up the SSD externally and choose to install Mavericks to that drive through my bootable USB. Than, once I booted successfully, I re-took the laptop apart, and put the SSD drive into the laptop. I didn't put the rail screws on this, I was just testing if it booted, so I just set it in the area it will reside. I booted and it wouldn't boot up at all, never saw Apple logo, just showed a blinking folder with quesiton mark on the screen.
If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd appreciate it, but now the internal drive connections don't seem to work, but I can boot externally for now. I figured I'd order the Hard Drive connector kit from ebay and see if that fixed it, since that is a 9 dollar part....
Thanks.

Speed up early 2009 macbook5,2 by switching mechanical hard drive to SSD

I am running Mavericks on an early 2009 Macbook5,2 4gb RAM CPU@2ghz Intel core 2 duo. It is running at an unacceptably slow speed. Network performance is very hopeless too. I am wondering if switching mechanical hard disk to a SSD would revive this macbook enough to keep it for a few more years. Please advise if this approach has a chance to improve its performance adequately. If yes, what steps to follow to migrate software on my existing hard drive to SSD?

Your Macbook has a SATA bus.
1. This is what I recommend. Some drives which are SATA 2/3 compliant do not support SATA 1. http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-2-5-Inch-SATA_6_0_gb-MZ-7PD512BW/dp/B0 09NB8WTI/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1405128604&sr=8-3&keywords=samsung+840+pro
I have used this in SATA 1 systems without any issues (the OCZ Vector is an example of problems with SATA 1).
2. Replacing the drive can be done using these steps - https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Core+2+Duo+Hard+Drive+Replacement/514
3. I suggest you use an external drive and make a Time Machine Backup of your MB, before you make any changes. If you have a Time Capsule, it can help as well (otherwise see if you can find a USB/FW external drive for backup).
4. Once you have a good backup, replace the drive using steps in 2. Take the old drive from the MB and put it in an external SATA enclosure (preferably one that has both USB and Firewire), so it becomes your external boot disk. If you do not want a SATA enclosure, you can also consider a FW only enclosure.
5. You can now boot from the external disk. Restore the TM backup in step 3 to the internal SSD. You will have to format the internal SSD (because it is usually unformatted). FW connectivity will allow you to daisy-chain the TM backup and your external boot drive. The restore also makes your internal drive bootable. All your applications/settings/accounts/passwords will also be preserved this way. You are essentially restoring everything from the old drive to the new drive.
If you need help regarding TM, let me know.

How to migrate from internal hard drive to SSD (Solid State Drive)?

I just bought 128GB SSD. I want to replace my internal hard drive with SSD on MacBook Pro. My internal drive has only Mac OS installed (no dual boot with Windows/Linux). Going forward I want to boot my Mac OS from SSD and use internal drive for backup purposes only. I read many forums regarding this here, but each one talks about different methods of doing it.
* Carbon Copy Cloner for the Mac side (free)
* Casper 6.0 for the Windows side (not free)
* SuperDuper
Can some one provide me with simple steps to migrate Mac OS along with my personal data from internal hard drive to SSD?

Because Windows is not involved, you don't need Casper or anything else Windows-related.
Use Disk Utility to repair permissions and repair the directory on your internal hard drive. Buy an external SATA hard drive enclosure* and mount your SSD in it. Connect it to the MBP and use Disk Utility to create a single GUID partition on it, formatting the partition Mac OS Extended. Use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, it doesn't matter which, to make a bootable clone of the internal hard drive on the SSD in the external enclosure. Restart the computer holding down the Option key, and select the SSD to start up from; the purpose here is to verify that the SSD really is bootable. If that works OK, shut down, disconnect the external enclosure, and exchange the drives.
*I recommend a FireWire 800 enclosure, but they are much more expensive than USB-only enclosures, which will work OK — USB is just slow.

Swapping hard drives between PXI-8115 and PXI-8105 won't boot up

I have a test system running Windows XP on PXI-8105. I've upgraded the entire test system for another project and need to upgrade my existing systems; the upgrade runs on Windows 7 and PXI-8115. I have new hard drives with Windows 7 and the new test software which were loaded/configured/tested on a PXI-8115, but I need to retrofit the PXI-8105 with them. This doesn't work. Windows begins to boot but fails and tries over and over again. In an effort to take the PXI-8105 off-line to troubleshoot, I replaced it with one of the PXI-8115 and the old (WinXP) drive. This didn't boot up, either.
Here's a summary of my situation:
An old system has PXI-8105 running WinXP
A new system has PXI -8115 running Win7
A hard drive (with Win7) from the PXI-8115 won't boot on the PXI-8105
A hard drive (with WinXP) from the PXI-8105 won't boot on the PXI-8115
What is different between the two PXI controllers that keeps me from swapping hard drives?
Jim
You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are. ~ Alice
Solved!
Go to Solution.

A couple thoughts:
1. Windows 7 probably works fine on a PXI-8105. Although NI never officially supported or shipped that configuration, I suspect that the default Windows 7 installation contains enough of the driver support needed to boot up.
2. In general, Windows is not very tolerant of swapping hard drives between completely different systems, especially with Windows XP and prior. Consider whether just installing fresh and copying over what you need is faster than trying to do this, but if you must, I would suspect that Windows 7 would be more tolerant of the swap.
3. As a debugging step, try pressing 'F8' during the boot process to launch the Windows boot menu and try safe mode or some of the other options. More information here.
4. If all else fails, Google is your friend here as there's nothing particularly specific about this being an NI product that you need to know when attempting this operation. Any information you find online about swapping hard drives between PCs should be relevant to your situation. Searching for 'swap hard drive to new computer windows 7' gave some useful hits on the first page. Beyond that, you can also look into using the 'sysprep' utility to try and clean the system and prepare for swapping to a new PC.

Cannot Install Windows 8 on Y480 with 1TB hard drive + 32GB ssd

After spending 12 hours on friday and 8 hours today doing screen share with techs from Microsoft, they have determined that Windows 8 will not install on this computer. Have tried everything from installing directly off of the hard drive, off a flash drive, off a dvd, to doing a complete clean install and nothing works.
Completely reformatting the hard drive was also attempted but the installation could not be completed becasue the partition I was installing on was oem restricted.
Anyone else had problems like this yet?

Ya, I'll definately keep ya'll updated. And I'm gonna keep messing with it to see if I can get it to work fairly efficiently.
In responce to superior, ya it'll work with pretty much any other laptop with a traditional hard drive, full ssd, or a company that updates the software on their machines for their customers when a major OS update is available. Hell, the release preview worked on my y480 through vmware. (It's definately a problem with the fact that the two drives are viewed as a single drive in 3 partitions, the main hdd, the sdd, and the backup hdd partition)
In terms of getting a refund, you may or may not need to have a case number with Microsoft, I'm not sure, but if i pursue that path, I'll definately post something.
If anyone is dead set on getting Win8 to work on their hybrid drive even if it isn't working completely efficiently, separate the ssd and hard drive using the Intel rapid utility so they show up as separate drives rather than separate partitions and then just install Win8 on the SSD. I'd advise you don't do this cause as I said, it entirely defeats the purpose of having a SSD since you'll need to store a majority of you data on the hard drive which isn't being accelerated with Rapid. Essentially, it would be near equivalent to having just a 5400rpm hard drive.

Swapping hard drives .... how does lightroom handle this ?

My photography is done on a separate computer to my online machine and the photo system never goes online ( so virus-proof ).
I use " Laser " brand hard drive racks which allow me to swap hard drives on each machine, and also to swap them between the two computers.
So I have several HDD's with different photo projects on each drive and some backups on HDD's as well.
Lightroom is a database system rather than a browser, so how will it be able to handle swapping HDD's in and out like this ? What happens if lightroom points to a file which is on another HDD not currently installed in the machine ? Will it be able to show all the thumbnails and tell me which HDD holds them ( as I believe programs like Imatch can )? Will lightroom be confused by this. Or will it set up its database on each HDD so each disc is a self-contained library with its own lightroom index ?
I know I can't be the only one with more photos than fit onto just one HDD. Can anyone please tell me how lightroom's library system deals with this situation ?

Thankyou very much for the responses so far ....
I see a potential problem because my HDD's are not permanently connected in the computer. Each HDD as it is swapped in and out is assigned the same identifier, say " drive D " or suchlike by windows. So my drive D might be any one of several HDDs .... with very different content to the previous drive D I had in the machine. If Lightroom stores its library for each of my drive D's on drive D itself, then I suspect there will not be problem because each HDD will be its own self-contained libary and Lightroom which resides on drive C will be able to operate on each one in turn. I will then have a series of HDD's dedicated to specific tasks, and can use Lightroom on all of them.
Windows works this way, where it resides on my drive C and performs operations on each drive D. It has no problem in " picking up " each new drive D at startup. I do not attempt to hot-swap.
But I do not know if this is how Lightroom operates. If Lightroom stores any of this information on drive C will it be able to differentiate between the different drive D's it is confronted with ?
Geoff's reply suggests that Lightroom might store some or all of its database/library with itself on drive C. Even this might work if the missing files are shown in red. I would just need to select the right HDD to put into the machine for the project I want to work on. Hopefully this will work like the external drive situation Andrew has described. I am using sticky labels to identify each HDD with the projects it holds at the moment ....
Sounds encouraging .... Thanks for the help.

Swapped hard drive boot problem

Swapped hard drives between 6530b and 6535b, neither boots. What did I miss? (Toshiba MK3255GSX and Hitachi HTS543223L9A300)

Disk Utility - Erase (drive, not volume) and make sure it is now GPT/GUID and not old Apple Partition Table format.
Even though it is data only, there can and are some problems (the older it was last formatted the more so perhaps).
Just pull the data off if needed. Handy to have a FW drive case for SATA laying around.
Migrating OS and apps from G5 to Intel is full of potential pitfalls.
Depending on the drive age, size, performance, I'd probably go for a WD Caviar 640GB $75 to transfer files onto, and then wipe the Maxtor and use it for an emergency backup drive off which you can run Disk Warrior and such.

Can I swap hard drives between 2007 and 2011 iMacs?

I have a 2007 iMac that I want to replace with a refurbished 2011 model. I had upgraded my 2007 iMac with a 1.5T hard drive and the 2011 model only comes with a 1T hard drive. And you can't do any upgrade at the Apple store on refurb units. SoI am just wanting to swap hard drives. The 2007 has 10.7 and it appears that the 2011 model has the same. (says elegible for 10.8 upgrade on Apple Store site.) I have replaced the hard drive myself, so I am familiar with the process.
Thanks.

The drives themselves are compatible, yes. However, the OS might not be. In any case, if you have a Time Machine backup (or some other backup) of the older iMac, it's best to wipe the drive and reinstall the OS once installed in the new Mac. Then you can just transfer your data, apps, and settings from the backup.
One important thing to note, though: the 2011 iMacs have temperature sensors built in on the hard drive, so if you use a drive other than one supplied by Apple specifically for that system, the fans will run at full speed all the time. Probably the easiest workaround: use something like smcFanControl to regulate the speed of the fans. Hope this helps!

How to swap hard drives?

I currently have a mid-2007 white Macbook with Tiger OS. I'm thinking of purchasing a 13" Macbook Pro, but would like to swap hard drives since my current one is 320gb 7200rpm.
What's the best way to do this? Can I just swap the drives out, and then reformat them with the installation discs? I don't mind reformatting the hard drives because I have all of my data backed up to an external already.

Yes, you can swap, reinstall the OS from the DVDs that come with the new MBP, then use Migration Assistant to transfer the data form your external backup.

Does Apple Genius change my iMac hard drive to SSD?? If i already bought a ssd ??? and just take ssd and my imac to genius and maintain my apple care??

Does Apple Genius change my iMac hard drive to SSD?? If i already bought a ssd ??? and just take ssd and my imac to genius and maintain my apple care??

wouldn't it make a difference if the SSD was an Apple product? And can't you order just the Apple SSD? At the local Apple store many of the geniuses won't touch it if it's a third party item.

Can I swap hard drives?

Hi.
I have a T400 with T9400 chipset. All (3) USB's have broken over the years and I recently purchased a used T400 on ebay with T9600 chipset to replace the older computer.
My question is can I simply swap hard drive from old computer to the new one and have everything work? The current computer is 64-bit Windows 7 and newer one is 32-bit...
Thanks for help!

>>> The current computer is 64-bit Windows 7 and newer one is 32-bit...
That statement is irrelevant. Either computer can run either Windows 7 version, no problem -- 4GB RAM addressability being the main limitation of the 32-bit version.
I would give it a try. Unless there are significant device differences (which I doubt), Windows 7 system loaded from the "old" HDD will work fine on the "new" ThinkPad.
In any event, I would rather use this opportunity to do a clean installation of Windows 7 64-bit, for which you have a COA key.

Swapping out hard drive fro SSD - does this invalidate the warranty?

I'd like to install a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB SSD Hybrid Internal Hard Drive http://bit.ly/SSDHybrid in a MacBook Pro I'm buying.
Will I be invalidating the warranty...?

Hi
I phoned Apple Care to ask the same question as I changed the stock RAM sticks and hard drive a month ago.
I even phoned up twice and spoke to two different staff to make sure I get the same answer.
Basic as the previous post stated, the warranty remains the same apart from the new parts you replace. However, Apple Care people told me if something went wrong when you are installing the new parts, then your warranty is not valid.
The process itself is pretty easy, I believe there are instructions on how to do it in the manual. There are also lots of videos on YouTube as well. You can also get Apple approved repair center to do the change if you prefer.
P.S. I kept the original RAM sticks and hard drive incase something goes wrong. Then I can simply put them back in the macbook to see if its the additional parts which are coursing the problem or the rest of the stock system. This will help me greatly when it comes to claim warranty repair.

Swapping OPtical Drive for SSD

I am going to swap my optical drive for an SSD to make everything far more faster. My computer is out of warranty so it won't be affected. I was just wondering what will happen to my existing hard drive when I clone the old hard drive and copy it on to the SSD? Obviously I will make it so my computer boots my SSD, does my old hard drive act in the same way an external hard drive does? Will I be able to save things on there just as easily as before?
Thanks

Go talk to Bmer over here
http://macosg.com/
What he did was move the hard drive to the optical bay and then replaced the boot drive with a SSD with a kit, he can walk you though it all as he's good with SSD's and all it's headaches. The kit also makes the Superdrive a external optical drive.
SSD's make good boot and program drives, but not a good file drive, use the hard drive for that instead.
One of the drawbacks is you can't boot from the OS X install disks or Windows disk or even perhaps not even Linux disks on a external optical drive.
So you'll have to learn all about Carbon Copy Cloner and option bootable clones too.
Download the free MacTracker and find out your SATA, as that can limit your SSD speed and could save you money as you buy the slower older SATA SSD's to match your hardware instead of the higher more expensive ones you can't use anyway.
Good Luck.

MacBook Pro: Swapping Hard Drives Between Two Identical Macs?

I have two Macbook Pro notebooks. They are both the June 11th 2012 models both with cd/dvd drives. They both have Mavericks installed on both.
I want to give my 15 inch to my son who has the 13 inch. They 13 will be mine and the 15 his.
Can i just swap his 750HD from the 13 and put it into the 15? Can i also remove my 250 Samsung pro SSD from my 15 and put it in his 13?
What are some ways i can go about this that are easy?
Thanks in advance,
PS: Like i said they both run mavericks and they are the same generation MBP from June 2012 release from Apple. Except one is a 2.5 i5 13 inch and the other is a 15 inch 2.3 Quad i7.
We pretty much just want to trade laptops and swap the hard drives easy.
Thanks again.

nn007400,
are each of your laptops associated with your respective Apple IDs? If so, then that might be a fly in the ointment when it comes to updating apps purchased through the Mac App Store, if the tie-in involves your MacBook Pros’ serial numbers as well as your Apple IDs. (I don’t know whether that’s the case or not.)
The disks can certainly be exchanged physically between the two portables — you could try it for a while, and if you encounter a problem, you can exchange them back and consider alternative (but unfortunately less convenient) approaches.

Swapping Hard Drive to SSD

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