03-02-2012, 02:22 PM

Might as well buy Snow Leopard then and save money.

Thankfully it looks like it won't come to that though. I called up Apple with a view to arguing my way to a copy of Snow Leopard or for them to reinstall it in store, but it turns out it's still under warranty. A helpful guy on the phone tried to run through some things and confirmed there was no way I'd get my data back even if I sent it to Apple. So I erased the OS to reinstall it but it gets stuck on the 'Loading Installation Information" screen so looks like I'll still have to send it off. As it's free though I'm none too bothered and they can fix my iffy CD drive while they're at it.

So plan is to get it reinstalled and fixed by Apple for free, then to copy it all onto my new hard drive so it's basically a plug & play installation. Should work?

03-02-2012, 03:23 PM

Sorry to hear you're having to go through so much to get your machine back in working order. However, it is good news that Apple is going to repair it for you under the warranty.

Yes, it should work. Keep making backups - and it might be a good idea in addition to Time Machine that you think about using cloning software. SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner are easy to use and will have you back up running in no time in case of a future hard drive failure. Both work well with Lion.

03-03-2012, 05:54 AM

I'll definitely be making back ups this time round. Right now I'm writing a list of all the albums on my iPod and I really don't want to be doing this again.

Would you mind clearing something up for me, a really stupid question? When I get it back I'll make a disk image on to my external hard drive so I'll have all the OSX files. How do I format the new hard drive, or can I boot up Utilities etc from the external hard drive to format the new one? Then do I copy the files back over onto the new hard drive or reinstall OSX using Utilities? Never done this before so not got a clue.

03-17-2012, 03:35 PM

The other day I received my Macbook through the post from being repaired. Great service from Apple, really quick turn around and they called me to make sure it was ok to lose all my data. In the end it's had a new hard drive, optical drive and battery as they found that to be prematurely failing too.

So now I'm at the stage of copying the OSX data on Mac's new hard drive to the larger hard drive I'm upgrading to. As above, please could I have a bit of a pointer as to how to do it?

Thanks

03-17-2012, 05:43 PM

Download Carbon Copy Cloner from here. (It's donation ware, so if you like it and use it, you can at your choosing send the author a donation.)

Use CCC to clone everything from your new internal hard drive to the larger external hard drive. (You will need either an external USB SATA carrier or adapter.) CCC will also render the new drive bootable and will copy the Lion Recovery partition in place.

After doing the above, test the drive by trying to boot from it. If it boots OK, swap out the internal hard drive with the larger one and you should be good to go.

03-19-2012, 07:39 AM

Thanks. Sounds pain free.

However as I haven't got a carrier/adapter, but I do have an external USB hard drive, could I clone the new internal hard drive to the USB drive, swap over the internal drive to the larger one I just bought, boot off the USB drive and clone back onto the new, larger internal hard drive.

Sounds like more messing about but saves me buying an adapter and waiting a bit longer. If the method you posted is more recommended though I'll wait and do the job properly.

03-19-2012, 08:43 AM

Originally Posted by chscag

Your external hard drive is probably formatted as NTFS which is read only from your Mac. So yes, you will need to reformat the drive to something that your Mac can read and write to. That leaves you with two choices: FAT-32 or HFS+

FAT-32 can be used by both your Mac and PC while the HFS+ format is Mac only. Be sure to backup everything on the external first before formatting.

There is the third option of exFAT, which - unlike FAT32 - allows files bigger than 4GB (i.e. if NTFS or HFS+ can handle it, so can exFAT), and can be read/written by Macs and most PCs...

03-19-2012, 11:01 AM

I reformatted to exFAT anyway, it didn't give me the option of FAT32 anyway. Didn't know that about it though

03-19-2012, 11:17 AM

Have just downloaded CCC and tried to clone the disk to my USB hard drive, it only transferred about 90MB and most of the folders are 'greyed out' so I can't select them to be copied.

It told me the USB hard drive may not be able to be used as it's not partitioned to Apple's recommendations and is not formatted to HFS+

03-19-2012, 12:54 PM

Sounds like this info is too late to help - but in case it happens again:

Is your 2009 one with the Nvidia chip(Discrete 9600GT and Internal 9400M?) I've found if you reset PRAM and everything else - you end up on the Lion Linen login screen - with nothing. Just the Linen. It seems to be a display issue when everything is reset - but the login boxes are still there - they are just invisible, as is the Apple. If you move your mouse to where the username and password boxes should be - you should see your mouse change from an arrow pointer to a text pointer. The top box is username and the bottom box is password. You can click in each - type in the proper response, and log in. It seems to happen when I switch to the 9400M and reboot - or if I reboot and reset the PRAM.

If you have a user picker - instead of username/password - I am not sure what happens - but I wasn't the only one to have this problem with the 2009 MBP. I found the tip on some other forum.

03-19-2012, 03:08 PM

Thanks Ivan, I'll remember that if there is a next time.

I've just reformatted my USB hard drive again, this time to Mac OSX Journaled. For some reason it wouldn't work earlier. So now CCC is cloning to the USB hard drive, I'll then try to reboot from the USB hard drive and if successful, swap the internal hard drives over, format the new internal drive and clone back onto that.

Unless someone tells me I'm wasting my time it should work?

03-19-2012, 05:45 PM

Well it seems to have worked using the above method. I am now posting using my Mac with the new hard drive in, booting and working brilliantly.

So now for the painful task of trying to recover all my music and as many photos etc as I can. Very annoying that the last 2 and a bit years of my work have just been lost - I restore classic cars so my Mac was effectively a portfolio of my work over the years - but my fault for not backing up. Mistake learned.

I can't thank all that helped enough, great stuff! Cheers guys (and girls?)