Stephen I don't know whether you proceeded as planned.
This is to report that I have today replaced 500gb HDD with Seagate 1000gb SSHD hybrid. The price of the 1000gb is so modest, and I've filled my 500gb disk so fast, the 1000 seems better than just 750,000,000,000 bytes to me.... (To think that 30 years ago I had a small educational software business, writing for the Commodore VIC20, for which storage was on cassette tape, no floppy let alone hard disk. And when you started the VIC20 it took off its shoes and counted up to announce it had 3295 bytes (just bytes) free. You had to be economical with programming!)
The physical replacement of the hard disk on my MacBook Pro 17in mid 2010 was very simple - if you have a very small Phillips head screwdriver and a Torx6 screwdriver (and a dish to hold the screws).
I had been running Yosemite but had a10.7 disk to boot from. I also have a retail 10.5 which may have been ok. Reading this discussion this evening I suspect I've gone a long way around, installing 10.7 then 10.10 before trying to restore from Time Machine. It sounds as though I could have simple connected the external disk with Time Machine, held down option and started up without installing any system. Time taken, but it's worked via this route: I don't know if going by the shorter route you would have an option to partition. Someone else may comment.
- place bootable system disk in DVD drive
- shut down
- change hd
- switch on, boot from dvd drive automatically
- erase/partition new HDD (if you wish to partition, I did not) using disk utility offered from setup disk
- install system (in my case 10.7)
- upgrade to free downloaded 10.10 latest (which also will, I hope, have solved some problems I seem to have had with Apple Mail)
- restart with finger on option key while the external disk with Time Machine contents is plugged in.
... including a fresh Time Machine backup to erased disk last night, this will have been a process of 28 hours or so, some tea breaks for the machine while I've been away.
