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Macbook Pro Mid 2010 Reinstall

oceanjaws

oceanjaws

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 20, 2007
90
1
Todmorden, West Yorkshire
Hi.
My faithful friend has started to crash and glitch.
I put 16Gb RAM and 1Tb SATA drive in there a few years back. Recently I had the SATA drive with only 90Gb free space. Stupid, I know. Of course, it crashed and crashed again, sometimes with a regular beep. Not three beeps, just constant beep beep beep beep etc.
Anyway, I've backed it up, cleared a lot of junk of it, I now have 314Gb free space, and I'd like to reinstall the OS. How can I do this? The latest OS isn't compatible. Is there a work around?
Many thanks for your advice.
Brian.
 
Last edited:
oceanjaws said:
Hi.
My faithful friend has started to crash and glitch.
I put 16Gb RAM and 1Tb SATA drive in there a few years back. Recently I had the SATA drive with only 90Gb free space. Stupid, I know. Of course, it crashed and crashed again, sometimes with a regular beep. Not three beeps, just constant beep beep beep beep etc.
Anyway, I've backed it up, cleared a lot of junk of it, I now have 314Gb free space, and I'd like to reinstall the OS. How can I do this? The latest OS isn't compatible. Is there a work around?
Many thanks for your advice.
Brian.
Click to expand...
You can use internet recovery to get what will probably be Lion 10.7.5 on the computer, but it may not work with 16GB of RAM, so you may need to downgrade that.
While the 2012 computers seemed to have the problem more severely, the SATA cable on the 2010 computers can also fail, causing crashes and erratic performance. Does the computer work when booted from a Firewire or USB drive?
 
chrfr said:
You can use internet recovery to get what will probably be Lion 10.7.5 on the computer, but it may not work with 16GB of RAM, so you may need to downgrade that.
While the 2012 computers seemed to have the problem more severely, the SATA cable on the 2010 computers can also fail, causing crashes and erratic performance. Does the computer work when booted from a Firewire or USB drive?
Click to expand...
It's running now, but incredibly slowly. I'm using CleanMyMac X at the minute, to find more things I can get rid of.
 
It could be the internal ribbon cable, or it could be the drive.

My guess is that "it's the drive".

Recommendation:
Replace the old drive (it's a platter-based spinning drive, is this correct?) with a 1tb SSD. The prices on these have come way down and are now quite reasonable. A couple of examples:
https://www.amazon.com/ADATA-Ultima...2.5"+SSD+1tb&qid=1561905570&s=gateway&sr=8-10

or

https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Powe...2.5"+SSD+1tb&qid=1561905570&s=gateway&sr=8-13

You would also need a dongle/adapter or enclosure.
A couple of VERY affordable examples:

https://www.amazon.com/SATA-Drive-A...ter+2.5"&qid=1561905324&s=gateway&sr=8-5&th=1

or

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Tool...adapter+2.5"&qid=1561905324&s=gateway&sr=8-10

a. Get Mac up-and-running with the existing internal drive
b. Connect SSD to adapter or put into enclosure
c. Connect to MacBook
d. Open Disk Utility and erase the SSD to Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format
e. You didn't tell us which version of the OS you're using. You can download CarbonCopyCloner from here:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html
(which version you download depends on which version of the OS you're using)
f. Use CCC to clone the contents of the OLD drive to the new SSD
g. When done, test the SSD BEFORE you install it into the MacBook
h. Power down, then reboot and IMMEDIATELY hold down the option key and KEEP HOLDING IT DOWN until the startup manager appears. Select the external SSD with the pointer and hit return.
i. Do you get "a good boot"? If so, look around, do things look as they should?
j. If so, NOW is the time to power down and "swap out" the drives.
k. When the swap is done, AGAIN reboot with the option-key trick as you did above. Now select the new SSD and try to boot with it installed internally.
l. How does it go?
m. You will have to go to the startup disk pref pane and designate the new SSD as the boot drive.
 
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