My HD is broken. What are my options?

[kousha]

Hi there,

By HD is completely busted and neither the recovery, nor the actual OS boots up. I have already bought a new HD but how do I install Mac on it? If I replace the Hard drives, and turn on the computer, will I be able to download Mavericks and install on it? Or do I need to find another Mac and install the OS on my HD from that computer?

Thanks

 

[Bear]

It would help if you said what year and type of Mac you have.

 

[Gochugogi]

Hi there,

By HD is completely busted and neither the recovery, nor the actual OS boots up. I have already bought a new HD but how do I install Mac on it? If I replace the Hard drives, and turn on the computer, will I be able to download Mavericks and install on it? Or do I need to find another Mac and install the OS on my HD from that computer?

Thanks

Do you have a backup of your system drive? If so, boot from the backup and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone it to your new drive. You can also restore from Time Machine. If you don't have backups, use the system DVD that shipped with your computer to start up your Mac and install on your new drive. I've done all of the above and it took hours but worked like new.

If you have no backups or system DVDs it gets harder. When I replaced a drive in my old MacBook Pro I had to gut an old FW enclosure, install my new drive in it and use another MacBook to install the system on it. Then remove from the enclosure, install in my machine and, finally, boot and configure. After all that I started keeping multiple backups as it took me a couple days of toil to get through all that. I'm sure someone with more expertise might have a few more ideas, maybe better ones.

 

[scaredpoet]

Hi there,

By HD is completely busted and neither the recovery, nor the actual OS boots up. I have already bought a new HD but how do I install Mac on it? If I replace the Hard drives, and turn on the computer, will I be able to download Mavericks and install on it? Or do I need to find another Mac and install the OS on my HD from that computer?

Depending on the model and age of the Mac, you might still be able to install OS X on the new drive. If the Mac came pre-installed with OS X Lion or newer, or if it's on this list of Macs and has up-to-date firmware, then you can use Internet Recovery to get OS X installed.

You'll need an internet connection, and a couple GB of data will get downloaded, so a good office broadband connection or a home FiOS/Cable modem service with a decent download speed is recommended, or plenty of time and patience if your connection's on the slow side. Just install the new drive, turn on the mac, and after it figures out that the drive has no OS installed, it'll launch Internet recovery, ask you to help it out with connecting to WiFi (if not connected by ethernet) and attempt to download the OS to install it.

If your internet connection just isn't up to the task, or if your Mac isn't cable of internet recovery, then you'll need to find another working Mac, and a good size (more than 4GB) USB drive, and follow these instructions to make a bootable install drive.