Cloning a broken hard drive?

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Cloning a broken hard drive?

So my hard drive just broke. Like a fool I accidently dropped it this morning and this means it cant be booted. I've tried everything I could find on reviving the thing but nothing has worked. However, after leaving it on the grey Apple booting screen for a good hour or so it finally managed to get to the desktop but was still going slowly. My macbook is able to boot of my external hard drive and I've checked the RAM and it's fine, which leaves me to believe that it's a problem with the hard drive itself.

Now the issue is that my external hard drive is only 160GB and my internal (now broken) one is 500GB with around 300GB of stuff on it (yes I do need it) and I don't want to have to lose it all. So is there any way of getting my currently broken hard drive and putting its data onto a new one? My idea is to take it out, install the new one and use the broken was as an external and do it like that. Any help would be appreciated!

Posted on Mar 28, 2012 4:05 PM

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Answer 1

John Galt

Level 10

140,894 points

Mar 28, 2012 4:13 PM in response to zackyc

... So is there any way of getting my currently broken hard drive and putting its data onto a new one?

You don't have to remove it, or even boot from it.

If you truly need all 300 GB you need to obtain an external hard disk drive or another computer with at least that additional capacity. Connect it to your MacBook and install a bootable OS if it doesn't already have one. Boot from it and run Disk Utility to repair the internal HD as much as it can. Then drag what you need from the broken one to the new one. Consider using Migration Assistant since it will address any potentially vexing permissions problems with the copied files.

When you are satisfied that you have copied everything necessary or possible given its damaged condition, replace the internal HD. Do not rely upon the damaged one for anything.

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