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roseshadow

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 13, 2011
2
0
This is the first real problem I've ever run into... I have a first gen Macbook, my hard drive finally died, so I picked up a new one. I do not have the original disk that came with my Macbook. I can't get the old hard drive running at all to retrieve or backup data (my dad had deleted all the time machine backups after I moved out of state). I honestly do not know what do to from here and I've been researching on what to do for a few days but I can't seem to find an answer. All I have is the Snow Leopard OS disk. If anyone can direct this poor Macbook n00b, I would really appreciate it.
 
What are you trying to accomplish? Replace the failed hard drive with the new one and install the OS on it?
 
Yes, I thought I could just take out the dead hard drive, replace it with the new hard drive, insert snow leopard OS disk, install snow leopard to new hard drive and that's it. But apparently it doesn't work that way. All I get is a flashing folder with a question mark, followed by the apple logo, then the circle with a slash symbol. From what I've read, it means my hard drive needs to be formatted with the disk that came with my Mac, which I don't have. So, what am I supposed to do now?
 
You need to boot from the Snow Leopard disc (hold down C while booting). Once it boots go up to the menu bar to the Utilities menu, scroll down and select Disk Utility. Select the newly installed hard drive from the side bar, from the Partition tab select 1 Partition from the Volume Scheme popup, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the Format popup, and from the Options button select GUID Partition Table, click OK, then click the Apply button. The disc will be formatted with 1 partition as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using a GUID Partition Table. Quit Disk Utility and you should now be able to install Snow Leopard on your newly formatted hard drive.
 
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