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I'm a techie; not a Mac-ie... backing up a Mac HDD to a PC? Reloading OSX?

CZroe

CZroe

Lifer
A neighbor wants me to replace her failed MacBook's HDD. It's not one of those 1.8" HDDs or anything so I can use any 2.5" SATA HDD that's slim enough to fit, correct? Also, she'd like me to attempt to back up any accessible data from her old drive. I have a USB adapter so I can attempt to access it with her Mac, but I wouldn't know how best to do this. I remember all the Mac filesystem utilities for PCs that helped in the floppy disk days. Is there anything like that for Mac HDDs? Anything backup/recovery oriented?

Her son slammed her MacBook closed. She took it to the Apple Store first and they confirmed the dead HDD. There's obviously no guarantee that it's accessible in at all. Will Ubuntu mount Mac-formatted partitions? Is it still HFS+ or whatever it used to be? How can I install whatever utility Boot Camp uses to access it in Windows?

Years ago I remember being surprised at how incredibly simple it was to load a fresh install of OSX on a new HDD (it was described to me), but I still have no idea how (forgot; never saw or used it after all). IIRC, it was holding some key with the disc in the drive. A little help?
 
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Put the disk in the drive, hold C or ALT after pressing the power button.

Put the new drive in the MacBook, put the old drive in a USB or FireWire enclosure. Install OS X to the new drive, see if you can access the old drive. If you can, see if you can use CarbonCopyCloner to transfer the files over to the new drive. At the end of the clone you will have an identical system to what she had before. You may also want to put your hands on DiskWarrior.
 
well when you are done... tell her to get some 1TB external drive and set it up as a time machine drive and plug it in regularly so it can back up everything... you can do a full restore to a new drive with a time machine back up no problems... can even use it to go to a new machine and not lose anything, settings, or really... anything its just like it was when the backup ran...
 
Yeah, it'll be a simple matter to install the HDD and reinstall OSX from the DVD that came with the MacBook. No worries whatsoever there. Any 2.5" SATA drive will work. If the new HDD is blank, and you have the OSX disk in the drive, it should boot from the OSX disk without having to press any keys or anything; if not, press and hold "C" while booting.

Then, put the old drive into your USB enclosure and plug it into the MacBook. If it recognizes anything when you plug it in, you will be able to just copy the old stuff to the new drive. If not, she will have to decide whether she wants that data bad enough to pay the $50 for DiskWarrior, which is an excellent tool. Although it can't perform miracles, I have had it lift data off of drives that were otherwise unreadable.

Good advice above from doh123. Buy her a USB drive and plug it in once a week, once a month, whatever. Time Machine is awesome and it's super easy to recover from a Time Machine drive. All you have to do to start a backup is plug in the drive that you've previously chosen for backups.
 
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