Help me save my hard drive please!

[zblaxberg]

SMART is telling me my hard drive is going to fail plus it has been having trouble starting up recently. It usually takes 3 tries for it to start and it takes a really long time. I've tried repairing permissions and zapping p-ram. I'm using carbon copy to completely clone my hard drive onto my external.

Once I buy a new hard drive, how can I transfer all data back onto it in the easiest way possible? Can use my snow leopard disc to format the drive and then is there a way to just transfer all data from my external onto it?

 

[drjuice]

IF Carbon Copy Cloner can successfully clone your drive, the most you'd have to do is drag-and-drop data onto the new drive. If CCC makes a bootable clone, you may be able to use Migration Assistant to automatically move data from your external to your new drive.

If your drive is failing, however, the data may be incomplete or corrupt, and you may not get everything back.

If you've already cloned everything to your external you can try booting from that by holding down Option on startup and selecting your external - however if it's not bootable it might not appear.

 

[iBookG4user]

If you can find another Mac, the easiest way to do it would be Carbon Copy Cloner. You would want to put the Mac with the new hard drive in Target Disk Mode and connect it to another Mac via FireWire. Now you'll want to hook up the external hard drive with the data and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your data from the external to new hard drive.

If you don't have another Mac available, you could see if hooking your external with the cloned hard drive to the Mac with the new hard drive works. In the Snow Leopard installation, you would select the migration from another Mac option. Or another thing to try is using Time Machine to create a backup of the data and use the restore from Time Machine Backup option.