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Help with installing a new hard drive

A

apolloa

Suspended
Original poster
Oct 21, 2008
12,318
7,802
Time, because it rules EVERYTHING!
Hi Guy's,

I have my brother in laws mid 2007 iMac 24". I am installing a new 2 terabyte Seagate hybrid drive and 4GB RAM to keep it going a bit longer.

I have his time capsule with all their backups.

Now my question is, after I've installed the new hard drive can I just use my 2010 MacBook Pro OSX 10.6 install DVD's to format the new iMac HDD and then restore the full time capsule backup to the new drive? Their Mac has OSX 10.9.5 on it.

Or do I have to make a OSX 10.9.5 restore drive?
 
You should be able to boot the Mac and hold Option. Then when the menu loads, go to disk Utility and format it. Then you should be able to restore fro the Time Machine backups.
 
apolloa said:
Cool, so the Mac kinda boots to some sort of interface with no OSX on the hard drive and the time capsule connected?
Click to expand...

Yes, by holding the Option button while booting, press it just as you hear the startup chime. If it doesn't work, load the DVD and do the same thing and get to Disk utility through the menu.
 
SandboxGeneral said:
Yes, by holding the Option button while booting, press it just as you hear the startup chime. If it doesn't work, load the DVD and do the same thing and get to Disk utility through the menu.
Click to expand...

Colour me impressed! I'll be giving it a go tomorrow after the tedious task of taking the Mac apart! I have to say, I do not know of ANY PC from 2007 that would look as good as their iMac and still work fine, we are upgrading the hard drive as they have about 2GB spare on the installed 500GB hard drive and it STILL chugs along, albeit a bit slow!

Another reason to love Macs:)
 
apolloa said:
Colour me impressed! I'll be giving it a go tomorrow after the tedious task of taking the Mac apart! I have to say, I do not know of ANY PC from 2007 that would look as good as their iMac and still work fine, we are upgrading the hard drive as they have about 2GB spare on the installed 500GB hard drive and it STILL chugs along, albeit a bit slow!

Another reason to love Macs:)
Click to expand...

Well good luck. If you want awesome step-by-step instructions with high-res photos, look up your Mac at www.ifixit.com and follow their tutorials.
 
Not working... hmm. I have installed the new drive, I pressed the option key on bootup and got nothing other then a blank screen and mouse cursor. So I popped my restore DVD in and it booted up, I formatted the new drive, and selected to restore from the time capsule but it said their were no backups on it?

So to save taken the imac apart again to install the old drive, can I connect the old drive via a USB case and bootup from it? Then make a restore DVD from here. And perform a full time capsule backup.
 
apolloa said:
cool, if it doesn't work and I need to put the drive back in there iMac, will having put it into a USB enclosure change the OS at all?
Click to expand...

No it won't change it unless you specifically do something to it like format it.
 
Ok, it has booted up fine with the original drive in a USB enclosure, so I am now trying to do a full backup as I think it may not have had one? Their were a lot of things in the excluded list. Then I'll try again with my MB Pro restore DVD.

EDIT: Well, the Time Machine backup is now suddenly over 500GB! A bit more like it :) I should have thought about this when the drive was still in the computer :rolleyes: oh well I'll leave it running overnight now as it'll take a while.
 
Last edited:
SandboxGeneral said:
You should be able to boot the Mac and hold Option. Then when the menu loads, go to disk Utility and format it. Then you should be able to restore fro the Time Machine backups.
Click to expand...

2007 iMacs don't have Internet Recovery. Those appeared in 2010/2011/2012, Not sure exactly when

----------
apolloa said:
Ok, it has booted up fine with the original drive in a USB enclosure, so I am now trying to do a full backup as I think it may not have had one? Their were a lot of things in the excluded list. Then I'll try again with my MB Pro restore DVD.

EDIT: Well, the Time Machine backup is now suddenly over 500GB! A bit more like it :)
Click to expand...

MacBook Pro DVD won't work on the iMac.
 
poiihy said:
2007 iMacs don't have Internet Recovery. Those appeared in 2010/2011/2012, Not sure exactly when

----------



MacBook Pro DVD won't work on the iMac.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I couldn't remember when they came in. Thanks.
 
poiihy said:
2007 iMacs don't have Internet Recovery. Those appeared in 2010/2011/2012, Not sure exactly when

----------



MacBook Pro DVD won't work on the iMac.
Click to expand...

The DVD worked fine, it just said it wouldn't install onto the iMac but it let me choose to restore from a time machine backup. As I said.. I don't believe they ever made a FULL backup.
 
poiihy said:
I think it was 2011, when Lion came out. They came with Macs that shipped with Lion.

----------

OP: You'd have to make a USB install stick. They are easy to make.
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372
Click to expand...

I had a read about making a USB stick too but I can't until I buy one, I only have a 2 GB one and it seems you need an 8 GB one. But I'll try again the same as I did the first time only with a full backup.
 
apolloa said:
I had a read about making a USB stick too but I can't until I buy one, I only have a 2 GB one and it seems you need an 8 GB one. But I'll try again the same as I did the first time only with a full backup.
Click to expand...



Rather that buy a USB stuck you can just use your external hard drive. Using Disk Utility you can create an 8GB partition, then follow the same instructions to put the installer on that partition.
 
Well.... after using the original hard drive to boot off using my USB2 HDD enclosure, and after 16 hours of doing a FULL Time Machine backup....

It is now restoring from the Time Machine onto the new hard drive, my MB Pro restore DVD has worked fine as it is enough to run the restore part of the OS :)

Only 5 ish hours to go.. then I am just waiting on the Crucial RAM we ordered.

Getting there now.......
 
apolloa said:
Well.... after using the original hard drive to boot off using my USB2 HDD enclosure, and after 16 hours of doing a FULL Time Machine backup....

It is now restoring from the Time Machine onto the new hard drive, my MB Pro restore DVD has worked fine as it is enough to run the restore part of the OS :)

Only 5 ish hours to go.. then I am just waiting on the Crucial RAM we ordered.

Getting there now.......
Click to expand...

Why aren't you just migrating the fresh install from your original hard drive in the external enclosure? It would seem that that would be much faster than performing the full TM backup, and then restoring from the Time Machine. Or you could use one of the cloning programs like CarbonCopyCloner to quickly clone the external original drive to the new drive. Of course, you needed to do the full backup sooner or later anyway.
 
Well it's all done :) and for me it was easier to just do the full backup and then restore from that to the Mac.
Is their anything else I now need to do or any tips to increase performance? Or is it simply a case of job done and leave the Mac to index everything, do I need to use the disk utility to rebuild any databases?

Thanks for all the help :)
 
Yeah ... I was afraid that you were probably pretty well finished with the restore process. But, if you ever want to do it again :) , the other methods are a somewhat faster ... but the results are the same.

Glad you got it going again ... and your environment should be just as you left it with the old disk, so nothing else is needed.

Good luck ...
 
hfg said:
Yeah ... I was afraid that you were probably pretty well finished with the restore process. But, if you ever want to do it again :) , the other methods are a somewhat faster ... but the results are the same.

Glad you got it going again ... and your environment should be just as you left it with the old disk, so nothing else is needed.

Good luck ...
Click to expand...

Yeah I'll remember for next time hah, but I should have checked for a full backup before I removed the drive.
And I installed a new Seagate 2 terabyte hard drive into the machine, so the old hard drive isn't in the computer but it will be kept.
 
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