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JacobT14

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 19, 2013
1
0
I've got a 13" 2008 MacBook Unibody. It's served me well for the past five years, but I'm considering upgrading the HDD to something a little bigger, or maybe an SSD. I want to make sure a little issue can be worked around before I lay money down for a new drive.

The DVD drive is essentially shot, it can accept and eject discs, but can't read them. This doesn't really cause much of an issue, as I never use discs anymore, but. If I stick a new drive in it, is there a way to load the OS back onto it without a working disc drive?
 

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,137
15,601
California
Do you have an external disk you are using for backups?

As long as you are on Lion 10.7.2 or better/later, you can just use Time Machine to backup to that external USB disk then use that to restore the OS and all your data to the new drive.

Just install the new drive then option key boot to the Time Machine backup. That will give you a recovery screen where you can format the new disk with Disk Utility then click restore. The OS and all data will get moved back to the new drive.

Afterward reboot to the new drive then go to System Preferences and in the Startup Disk pane select the new drive as the boot disk.
 
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