Q: I need some advice on how to upgrade my MBP mid 2010 HDD to SDD without using clone software
Sadly I had resisted upgrading the OS and kept my Snow Leopard running up to a few weeks ago when the incompatibility of various things became a nuisance I took the plunge and upgraded to OS El Capitan. This pretty much killed my Hard drive. It kept failing to fully boot and eventually when it did, any function took an eternity to action. I took it to the Genius Bar and after a bit of testing it came up with hard drive failure. Based on the advice given to me - I was told I should purchase a Samsung EVO 850 and it would take me 10 minutes to install it and simply use time machine to get my data across.
I can happily operate on people, but machines seem way more complex.
I decided to do a fair bit of reading, and now am getting somewhat stuck and confused as clearly it is not that simple.
I have a SATA-USB cable. I think I know how to mount the SSD via the SATA connection, format it and then fresh install OS El Capitan.
The thing to note is that my MBP has been behaving erratically the last 2-3 years with episodes of kernel errors and freezing and shutting down. I figured it previously had something to do with an external app - google chrome and got rid of that to use Opera instead. It made the errors far less frequent but nevertheless still occurred.
Because of this it did not seem logical to use the clone apps (though clearly would have made life simpler) and I need to somehow do this the long way round....or so I believe, but please correct me if wrong.
I have a Time Machine backup before I upgraded my OS, and prior to attempting anything I shall do another one so its off the new OS.
My questions are:
1. After formatting my SSD, should I make a partition?
2. Is it acceptable to then simply drag a copy of the OS El Cap to the SSD and launch it hopefully leading to installation?
3. What is the best way to migrate my data?
Please note I am not a tech savvy person, have never done anything like this before and its taken me weeks to get to these conclusions so far.
Any advice with step by step instructions will be gratefully received.
Thank you.
MacBook Pro, iOS 10, Mid 2010 model
Posted on Sep 24, 2016 6:36 AM
You can enable TRIM after you move the drive inside the computer.
Since you know your Hard Drive has some problems, I would choose to source the data from your backups. It should not make a lot of difference. 'Not booting from that Hard drive' indicates the over 350,000 files that make up MacOS X are damaged, but you are replacing those with a new copy.
Posted on Sep 25, 2016 8:01 AM