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Garussell

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 8, 2013
43
0
so i have a folder of my macintosh HD on an external hard drive and i was wondering how to go about and restore my macbook using this folder
 
It depends on how you copied it over?

If you did a proper clone you will able option key boot to the external drive then use Disk Utility to clone the external to the internal following this video.
 
well I didn't do anything in the video I just opened my hard drive on finder and selected everything then copied it to my external hard drive
 
well I didn't do anything in the video I just opened my hard drive on finder and selected everything then copied it to my external hard drive

If you just opened Finder and drag and dropped Macintosh HD, you will not be able to make a bootable restore from that. That would copy over your personal data though, like documents and music etc.

You will need to reinstall the OS make a user account then you can copy your personal data over. What year and model Mac do you have?
 
ah ok thanks for letting me know but i have a unibody macbook late 09
 
ah ok i mean i downloaded the OS using the internet recovery when installing my SSD earlier this year

If you already have the OS installed, say like Mavericks, yes you can command-r boot to the hidden recovery partition on the drive and reinstall the OS that way. But if there is no recovery partition on the drive you would need to use Internet recovery and you Mac does not support that.

There is a pretty good article here that explains it. The article is for Mountian Lion, but it still works the same way.
 
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