Can I use an external harddrive to replace to internal drive of my MacBook Pro?

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Can I use an external harddrive to replace to internal drive of my MacBook Pro?

The HDD in my 2009 MacBook Pro seems to be dying at the moment. I'm trying to get all my data off but the computer just keeps crashing..

I've tried just about everything: drag/drop (this works, but some things seem to be corrupted sometimes and it won't copy everything, also crashes and freezes over and over again). I've tried the same thing in Safe Mode which doesn't seem to change much.. I then bought a new external hard drive to backup everything as a disk image through the disk utility in the recovery partition, but that kept failing as well, whether encrypted or not.

I am painstakingly dragging/dropping everything to an external device at the moment which takes hours at a time to copy what I can from my folders between freezing and crashing. I'm now wondering if it would be possible to use an old external hard drive to replace the one in my machine? I'm no pro on these things, but I know enough to be able to do it myself.

If it's possible how would I go about installing OSX to the drive? I have an old 2007 MacBook (which is just as useless) and I also have a PC, perhaps it could be installed from one of these? I also have an old boot disc (Leopard I think) - is it possible to install the OS onto a blank hard drive by booting from disc?

Any help on the matter would be appreciated. Obviously buying a new hard drive (or arguably a new machine) is the best way to go about it, but I figure I may as well use this spare drive if I can.

Sorry if this is long-winded, just trying to answer any questions on what I've tried so far.. More info / specs available if needed.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Adam.

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10), null

Posted on Aug 3, 2015 7:23 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 3, 2015 7:32 AM in response to SoundVisionZ

Hi Adam,

If you have a good external drive, you can use Disk Utility to make that a bootable drive, just open DU, select Restore tab, then the internal drive (usually Macintosh HD) and drag that to the Source block, then drag the name of the external drive to the Destination block, then click Restore. When that finishes you will have a bootable external drive.

Restart the Mac holding the Option key, and you will get a grey screen showing the internal drive and the external drive. You will have to click the external to make an up arrow appear under it, then click the up arrow. The machine will continue bootup using the external drive. That should give you a stable platform from which to drag and drop contents that have not been transferred so far.

You can then make some decision on replacing the internal drive since that is much faster for data transfer than any external drive on a USB bus.

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