Workaround for WD un-Bootable Drive?

Discussion in 'MacBook Pro' started by Jeferson, Oct 26, 2012.

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  1. Jeferson, Oct 26, 2012
    Last edited: Oct 26, 2012

    Jeferson macrumors newbie

    Joined:
    Oct 26, 2012
    #1
    Hello there. I have a question about bootable drives. My son's June 2009 base MBPro started acting wonky this week. Really slow, slight clicking sound intermittently. Updated everything and downloaded CCCloner and cloned his drive to a freshly formatted Western Digital external drive, and although CCC warned that the WD drive wouldn't be bootable, I figured that in a pinch I'd be OK until I could grab a better external drive. I've sinced confirmed on WD's website that this product won't be bootable for me.

    The next day(!) the drive in the laptop died. So I've had a look at the resources on this site http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=15588995#post15588995 (wonderful stuff, folks!) and gone ahead and ordered a Samsung 830 256GB SSD along with 8GB of RAM to replace the current 2GB. My one fear is this: I'm hoping that even though the WD drive isn't bootable, I can hook the new SSD to a SATA-USB cheap dock (ordered), then connect both the backup WD and the new SSD to a working Mac, format the new SSD, and then use CCC to clone the entire WD external backup to the docked SSD. THEN, I'd have a bootable SSD that I can check out in the dead MBP first while booting up from it, and then finally installing that SSD in the MBP and we're off to the races.

    So my question: Even though the WD backup isn't considered bootable (CCC's warning), would using CCC to clone it to the new SSD result in a BOOTABLE SSD? If not, is there anything else I can do to get around it given that the HD in the MBP is dead? This fresh WD backup has to be good for something, I hope.

    Thanks in advance for any assistance. :)

    Jef
     
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  2. xxcysxx, Oct 26, 2012

    xxcysxx macrumors 6502

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2011
    #2
    let me give this a try.:D though i do stand to be corrected.:)
    first. i'm not familiar "CCC", i presume that's probably "carbon copy cloner", yes?
    second. hard drive are hard drive. they can be bootable if you make them to.
    next. there is such thing as a "bare metal restore". this method produce a one-to-one copy of the original hard drive. even the boot sector of the original hard drive!
    however, a boot sector is a windows stuff. mac uses an extensible firmware interface built onto the main board which load the os kernel from the hard drive (so no boot sector on hard drive), perhaps a set of identifier specifically for each hard drive is being read by the firmware every time at boot. making cloned hard drive un-bootable.

    my best advise is do a fresh install of the os onto the new hard drive and recover what ever files from the old hard drive and redo all the setting from scratch. you will probably spend a full day, but you will get maximum one-to-one system performance. you could use the cloner software to make back up of your hard drive, and when you have problems with your system you just restore the back up and the problem is gone. but you can only restore to the original hard drive that you back up from since it is already identified by the firmware for that specific install of the os. does that make sense?

    i've learned this through my own experience when i try to install windows 7 using uefi. my challenge was when i was trying to do a sector-by-sector back up of uefi system, i always to this for safety measure just in case!, when i restore the backup i run into licensing issues with registered software. like certain games that have limited number of installs. i had to register all the software all over again. i did it a couple times and still come out with the same results. i concluded there isn't a reliable software to effectively cloned an efi system.
     
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