Restoring to a new hard drive?

if you dont have an enclosure to put the new hard drive into, what else could you do?. Just install the new drive, partion, restart and press command R and then back up from time machine?

kiwi92651

This is an old thread, but let me see if I can help...

You can't use command-R to format a newly installed drive because there's no Recovery partition on the new, unformatted drive. If you have a fairly new Mac, you might be able to use command, option and R to boot into Internet Recovery and format the drive.

The best option, however, is to use the method discussed above.

Clinton

These enclosures are cheap, 10-20$.

Everyone should own a HD enclosure,...... the sad part however is that 95% of them are very poorly made with 50 cent SATA bridge cards in them that are utterly certain to fail after a number of hours.

The very reason all those HD enclosures are $5 wholesale.

The best option, though not portable is a powered USB HD dock, Uspeed makes the most reliable of them, and is only $20, and will accept 2.5" or 3.5" HD.

The most reliable portable option, superior to a HD enclosure for bare HD is : Anker Uspeed USB 3.0 to SATA 3ft Converter Adapter Cable for 2.5 inch/3.5 inch Hard Drive Disk HDD and SSD They are $20 in most cases.

http://www.amazon.com/Anker%C2%AE-Uspeed-Converter-Adapter-included/dp/B005B3VO2 4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1376986299&sr=8-2&keywords=anker+sata+connector

dmdimon,

Question regarding your comment -

boot pressing Option with new drive installed and TM backup drive connected

select boot from TM

restore.

Do I need to install the OS onto the SSD drive before I restore the TM backup onto the SSD drive or will it install the OS as part of the backup?

Thank you!!

Doug

everything in one go

Thank you so much!!

So how long does it take to search for the TM backup?

I have a Mac Mini mid-2011 (version 5.1, model: A1347). The internal drive started failling. It would freeze frequently, but I could run Time Machine to an external drive, which I did daily. I finally bit the bullet, bought an equivalent drive from Newegg.com (about $80 for 500 GByte), got the directions from iFixit.com, bought a set of Torx tools - need T6 and T8 for the installation.

I carefully removed the old drive following the good directions on iFixit, and installed the new drive by reversing the steps. There were only a few minutes of difficulty in getting the screws back in, but I patiently worked and got them in place. It took about an hour of careful labor.

I had nothing to help with the boot up process, so I just tried it without anything else. Plugged in the USB exernal drive, the keyboad and monitor, and turned it on.

It brought up a screen telling me to activate the button on the trackpad (or mouse) and it found it promptly. Then I clicked on the continue button, followed the directions, and it started installing from my last backup.

Actually, the initial menu also let you run disk utility, which I did, and erased (formatted) the new drive - I used Exented, case sensitive, since I am an old unix type guy. But I don't think I had to do that before the restore step.

Anyway, it took about 2 1/2 hours for 300 GByte or so onto the 500 GByte drive.

[Note: The $80 sounds a lot better than the Apple dealer cost (about $150 labor plus the drive cost). I am a fix-it type guy, good with my hands, and worked up the courage to tackle it. I am 72 years old on fixed retirement income, so didn't want to spend the extra money. Glad I took the chance to do it. If you have questions, just contact me through this community.]

Hope that helps new ones that search this thread.

Boyd

doing this way, will the time machine recognize the new drive and continue from the last backup (without creating a new backup)?

I think it did do a new backup, but I found it is easy to delete a backup - Had to search how to it - I think you just right click on its name. On the list on the right hand side of the screen, and it gives that option - something like that.

Sorry to be so late in replying - I just now saw yor question.

Thanks for your reply, finally I restarted the mac (with the new drive in) from a bootable usb drive with OSX ML install files and did a time machine restore... took the whole night but no issue at all.

That's good. Have a great holiday season.

Boyd

Tried doing that with my MBP (2009) and Mavericks OS. Says "The Start Up Disk can't be used as a restore Disk." Says to restart using recovery system and open disk utility again. Not familiar with Recovery System... But will google it to see if it's an esay thing to do.

Richie