Q: Trying to boot from a new drive
My friend has a MacBook from 2007, don't know anything else, hence the problem. The hard drive was failing to boot on startup. We removed the hard drive and hooked it up to mine, and it said there was an error. Disk Utility tried to repair, but failed. That hard drive is dead. So we got a spare hard drive, that we know works, and used that. On my MacBook Pro (2012, running Mavericks), we used recovery mode to install a new OS X Mavericks onto that spare drive. Install went fine, booted up, set itself up fine, and got to the home screen. So we powered everything down and moved that drive to the old computer. Still nothing. We get a blinking folder with a "?" on it. We held Option on startup and selected the new drive, then it just goes to a blank screen; no logo or anything. Are we missing something? Is there anything we can do at this point? Or is it time to throw in the towel and declare it dead?
Good news, I was able to backup her files off the now dead drive. So if we ever get it working, she has her files.
MacBook
Posted on Sep 19, 2014 5:57 PM