Replacing Mac HD, how to reinstall Lion purchased from Store, and, Restore

[andyhutch1947]

My Late 2009 iMac is getting extremely slow so I ran "Repair Disk" and it showed a lot of errors and said to replace HD and restore. I am unsure whether to replace with original Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA or if I can replace with any similar HD. I would like to upgrade from 1TB to 2TB HD. What HD would you suggest?

Once replaced I understand I need to format HD. My current HD shows three Volumes. #1, disk0s1: ; #2, Macintosh HD: ; #3, Recovery HD:. I am using Lion, v 10.7.4, which I purchased from the Apple Store. No disk.

I use Time Machine on an external drive.

Once I physically install the new internal HD, what do I do next to make my iMac operational again?

Thanks for your help
Andy

 

[Heisler98]

Hi,
(I'll leave the deciding of the HD up to a more educated person, I'm not so knowledgeable on what kind of HD you should get, although I do have a Seagate Barracuda in my iMac and it works very nicely)

I'm not entirely sure if you can boot from a Time Machine disk. I don't believe you can, but it's always worth a shot. Should you be able to, run Disk Utility on your old Lion and format the new HD to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and add as many partitions as you want.

If you can't boot from the Time Machine disk, I would find some way to download Lion (from Mac App Store or otherwise) and restore the DMG file (look at bottom for link to how to do that) to a flash drive. Then, you can boot to the installation screen and use Disk Utility to partition and format the disk, then install Lion, and backup from the last backup in Time Machine.

If someone has an easier way that I can't think of, please feel free to come forward with it.

Hope that helps,
H.

http://macs.about.com/od/macoperati...le-Flash-Drive-With-Os-X-Lion-Installer_3.htm (link to how to create bootable flash drive with lion installer)