Help I pwned myself back to Mesopotamia

[None Such]

My MacBook Pro got the "? Folder" so I bought a new hard drive and installed it. I Couldn't get anything to come up so I put in an old Leopard disc and then the apple logo came up etc. I installed that like a dolt. Afterwards I tried to do a backup from time machine but nothing showed up.

After that I tried migrate assistant but it only showed what was there when I tried to set up Time capsule to recover everything. I would really like all my family photos, music and El Capitan back. Any ideas? TIA

 

[Weaselboy]

Tell us a little more about your Mac. What year and model is it?

So you installed Leopard 10.5 on there from the DVD?

Don't try and backup to the Time Capsule for now. I'm afraid you will overwrite your data that is on there.

 

[None Such]

Tell us a little more about your Mac. What year and model is it?

So you installed Leopard 10.5 on there from the DVD?

Don't try and backup to the Time Capsule for now. I'm afraid you will overwrite your data that is on there.

2007 Macbook Pro. I actually got it all up and running over the weekend. I installed Leopard from a dvd I had, then Snow Leopard and then was able to get it back to El Capitan. Then I did Migration Assistant and it took awhile but said it was copying over all my files. It didn't move over any of my documents. Including all of our family photos. Though I found backups for most of those.

It was fine for a few days and then last night I got the ? folder. Guess it's time to put this one down?

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

It could be a faulty hard drive cable. You should try putting the old HDD in an enclosure and see how it mounts.

 

[Weaselboy]

It could be a faulty hard drive cable. You should try putting the old HDD in an enclosure and see how it mounts.

Agreed... a bad cable will cause this issue. OP try popping the drive in an external USB enclosure to see if it works okay from there. If it does, it is very likely you have a bad internal drive cable.

 

[None Such]

thanks for the help guys, I reinstalled El Capitan and got it running again and then shortly afterwards the screen went out.

Maybe it was a cable, perhaps I jumped the gun here but I went ahead and purchased a new Macbook Pro! Very happy with it. The old one had other issues such as the backlit keyboard only partially working and a cracked side from my son dropping it.

Great news is that I was able to find all my old files on Time Capsule with it. Including my family photos and that made my wife VERY happy.