Hard Drive Cable crapped out... is it safe to run my HDD externally for now?

[Synergie]

So I thought my hard drive itself crapped out (was not found at all), bought a new solid state 480 Gb drive... the fast ATI radeon one. Installed it, put everything back togetehr went to INternet Recovery, and tried to restore from Time Machine... still no hard drive found!!! Luckily I have an external hard drive dock that connects USB so I plugged it in, and low and behold... OSX booted! It was the cable!!!

Oh well.. solid state will be faster anyway.

But until I can get to Apple to buy a cable... (and then figure out how to change it out myself) Is it safe to run OS X from this external dock??? The laptop seems to be getting really hot running it this way (although it's reassuring that all my data is fine after all!)

But can I use it like normal for now with the hard drive in the external dock via USB? Is it safe to run like this? Should I be worried about the heat??

 

[snaky69]

So I thought my hard drive itself crapped out (was not found at all), bought a new solid state 480 Gb drive... the fast ATI radeon one. Installed it, put everything back togetehr went to INternet Recovery, and tried to restore from Time Machine... still no hard drive found!!! Luckily I have an external hard drive dock that connects USB so I plugged it in, and low and behold... OSX booted! It was the cable!!!

Oh well.. solid state will be faster anyway.

But until I can get to Apple to buy a cable... (and then figure out how to change it out myself) Is it safe to run OS X from this external dock??? The laptop seems to be getting really hot running it this way (although it's reassuring that all my data is fine after all!)

But can I use it like normal for now with the hard drive in the external dock via USB? Is it safe to run like this? Should I be worried about the heat??

1. It's perfectly safe to boot from an external. If it wasn't, why would the feature be built-in?

2. I strongly doubt it is getting any hotter than it did before. It has zero reason to.

3. Apple will not sell you a hard drive cable(or any spare part for that matter) to change by yourself. You'll have to buy it elsewhere such as ifixit.com if you intend to do so. The swap really isn't hard.

 

[Intell]

Yes it is fine to run it like that.

 

[JTToft]

Agree with the guys above.

Also, why were you worried your data might not be fine if you keep a Time Machine backup?

 

[Synergie]

Agree with the guys above.

Also, why were you worried your data might not be fine if you keep a Time Machine backup?

Because several times now the Time Machine backup came up telling me I had to start all over with a whole new backup from scratch. One only happened just a few days ago (after the issues started happening with my hard drive, spinning wheels, random reboots etc) so I am hoping that some errors didn't get transferred to the backup. The entire new backup took about 8 hours so I am hoping it actually backed up properly.

If not, I know this hard drive still works now, so I can maybe carbon copy clone it?? Does that app still work in (I am in 10.10 still... for some reason I can not install 10.10.3 it keeps hanging, coming up with messages saying the file is corrupt or cant be verified etc and I think its because I dont' have the original RAM in here as I upgraded it... its a known issue) so I am stuck on 10.10 until I can find some original ram to swap out long enough to do the upgrade and then swap back. But anyway does carbon copy cloner still work with 10.10??

 

[JTToft]

If you just want to clone one volume to another, you can simply use Disk Utility's "Restore" function. There's no need for third party software for that.