MacBook Pro hard drive replacement and Lion...

[stevenb]

Well, after five years the old hard drive is on its way out. I have a new Seagate 750GB 7200 rpm to replace the 200GB one. I need to replace both fans anyway as they are loud, and going to replace the thermal compound as well. Basically, going to go through it. Hope it works when I am done. I now have Lion as my OS and no disc obviously as it was downloaded.

So, do I just replace the hard drive and install Snow Leopard, and then Lion afterwards? I have the hard drive backed up on a Time Capsule, but does it back-up the OS (i.e. Lion).

My iMac hard drive just failed under warranty and the Apple Store put Lion back on it when they returned it. So, I did not have to do any re-install of the OS. I just restored everything else off the Time Capsule.

Thanks in advance.

 

[imaketouchtheme]

You should be able to use your install disc from Snow Leopard and boot from it. From there, you can go to the Utilities option in the Menu Bar and select 'Restore from System Backup' and you should be able to completely restore everything from your backup.

 

[stevenb]

Thanks for the quick reply. I was hoping it would boot up off of Snow Leopard and then just use my Time Capsule back-up to restore. I just did not know if the back-up would put Lion back on the new hard drive. I will let you know after the weekend surgery. Hope it starts up fine after the work. Thanks.

 

[imaketouchtheme]

Thanks for the quick reply. I was hoping it would boot up off of Snow Leopard and then just use my Time Capsule back-up to restore. I just did not know if the back-up would put Lion back on the new hard drive. I will let you know after the weekend surgery. Hope it starts up fine after the work. Thanks.

Yes, it will completely load the OS back on. The only thing it will NOT do is any cache/local files you had at the time (temporary web files, Spotlight indexing, etc) as well as any passwords you had saved. Also, you'll have to reauthorize your iTunes library.