Replaced Hard Drive & OSX, System won't Restart

Question

Replaced Hard Drive & OSX, System won't Restart

I have a late 2008/early 2009 MACBOOK PRO.

This past week I was getting the flashing question mark/file folder sign after a "crash" so I replaced the Hard Drive with a 1 TB Hard Drive & reinstalled OS X (Leopard for now)- both appear to be "successful" installations in that the system is recognizing the hard drive, etc...BUT when I restart the system, It never makes it past the Apple Logo/spinning wheel start up screen to finish the installation & it never takes me to the regular desktop menu.

Any ideas on what this could be or what to try next to get it moving forward so i can finish the applications installation. I'm also trying to get it updated to a more current OS. It's such an old system that I'm having a terrible time finding help/solutions but I need to get it operational if possible. New Logic Board? Ideas?

Thanks so much! 🙂

MACBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Oct 9, 2015 12:18 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 14, 2015 7:24 PM in response to Jeepgirlsauni

No replies :-( i REALLY need to get this figured out...everything i've tried isn't work...can anyone offer advice?

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Answer 2

Oct 14, 2015 8:10 PM in response to Jeepgirlsauni

before you replace HDD, the first important think is you must backup your file and OS also the recovery hd. You can using some programs such carbon copy for cloning your OS into your new HDD. Then change the new HDD which contain your cloning OS and replace with that. That is the safety procedure.

If you forget to cloning you recovery HD, you may crash the OS X system

Maybe you can try to reset the hard drive again by press command+R for using the recovery menu and choose disk utility. And you can repair from there

But remember to always backup your data dude

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Answer 3

Oct 14, 2015 8:17 PM in response to Jeepgirlsauni

Jeepgirlsauni wrote:

...so I replaced the Hard Drive with a 1 TB Hard Drive & reinstalled OS X (Leopard for now)- both appear to be "successful" installations in that the system is recognizing the hard drive, etc...BUT when I restart the system, It never makes it past the Apple Logo/spinning wheel start up screen to finish the installation & it never takes me to the regular desktop menu...

The installation isn't successful if you can't reboot from the HD you've installed. When you physically installed the HD, you must have booted from the Installation DVD in preparation to install Leopard. You first needed to partition the HD using Disk Utility since the HD was probably set up for a Windows machine, not a Mac and while the HD would be "recognized" it still needed to be made Mac compatible. Did you do that? If not, boot from the install DVD again and use Disk Utility to give the HD one new partition and a GUID partition table. Then Install Leopard. But to install a more current OS, you'll need to upgrade at least to OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard because all more recent OS versions have to be downloaded from the App Store (no more DVD's😟) and 10.6.8 was the first version which allowed you to do that.

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