Easiest way to start fresh with a new hard drive?

Question

Easiest way to start fresh with a new hard drive?

RIP my MacBook Pro's hard drive. I got the dreaded 'this drive can't be repaired' error yesterday, so I wiped and restored with Time Machine and it seemed fine at first. This morning, the computer kept seizing up and I had to do a hard reboot, which failed. I have no reason to believe there's anything wrong with other components such as the motherboard. The hard drive gave me plenty of indications that it was dying.

I'll be ordering a new drive shortly. Any suggestions for good drive for an early 2009 17" MBP? I currently have a 320GB drive and that's plenty, no need to go bigger unless I can get a 500GB drive for the same price. I can do the switch myself.

I'm also trying to figure out the least painful way to get the new hard drive up and running. All the info I find has me transferring data from the old one to the new, but that's not possible obviously and why would I even want to since I have backups.

Can I just do a restore from the last Time Machine backup? Or do I have to install ML on the new drive and then use Migration Assistant? Would my bootable full backup be of any value?

I want as fresh of an install as possible with minimum fuss -- all my apps, all my data, none of the file permission errors, etc. Is that even possible?

Thanks!

Rae

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), early 2009, 17"

Posted on Feb 19, 2013 9:16 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

diratzlol

Level 1

5 points

Feb 19, 2013 9:32 AM in response to Traveling Rae

You can boot up from the Mac OS X Install Disc that came with your machine or using the Recovery system if you have Lion/Mountain Lion installed. In the Utilities menu that will be on the top of your screen after you boot to the disc, you'll have an option to Restore From Time Machine Backup.

Once you choose that option, it will perform a full carbon copy restore from your Time Machine backup.

"Restoring your entire system from a backup

If you are restoring a backup made by a Mac to the same Mac

With your backup drive connected, start up your Mac from the Recovery system (Command-R at startup) or Mac OS X v10.6 installation disc (With the disc in the optical drive, 'C' at startup). Then use the "Restore From Time Machine Backup" utility."

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11192?viewlocale=en_US

Tada.

Done. 🙂

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Answer 2

Feb 19, 2013 10:05 AM in response to diratzlol

That sounds way too easy! 😀 I'm assuming I'd have to format the disk first then do the recovery from Time Machine? Recovering from Time Machine would also install ML?

I won't have access for months to an internet connection that would let me redownload ML, so I'm hoping you're right and restoring from Time Machine is all I need to do. If that's the case, I'm just 15 minutes for installation plus about 3 hours for recovery (and the time to run into town to buy a drive) to be right back where I was when my hard drive had its fatal stroke. I love Macs. 🙂

Moral of the story folks: have backups. I have two friends whose hard drives died and ended up paying $$$ for data recovery services that didn't get everything back (one lost 5 years + of pictures). It's not fun to be stuck on a Windows PC until the new drive is in, but I'm not even sweating this. Phew.

Thanks for the reply!

Rae

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