[SOLVED] Mac hdd replacement

[wolfson]

Nice! I just booted it without a hdd and it went straight into "internet recovery". It downloaded and ran the OS X Utilities program which now presents me with the option to Reinstall A New Copy Of OS X. So I can just throw in a new hdd and let it do it's thing.

Another tip, if you're planning on working with Macs in the future, you can download Apple's latest OS from the Mac App Store and put the installer on a flash drive: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372 which would be much faster to install than via Internet Recovery.

edit: you'll need a mac workstation to do this, though.

 

[glennd]

For the sake of completeness: I put in a fresh WD drive and booted to the recovery and started the install. When it presented the drive selection list, it was empty. I have to "erase" the disk with the utility program then it shows up in the selection list. It then started downloading. After several hours it rebooted and presented the flashing folder question mark icon. Apparently this is it's cute way of saying there's not boot disk. After much reading someone mentioned it doesn't like doing this over wifi so i plugged it into the router. This completed in about an hour and resulted in a successful boot to OS X. yay!!

So now I'm a Mac expert

 

[Markverhyden]

For the sake of completeness: I put in a fresh WD drive and booted to the recovery and started the install. When it presented the drive selection list, it was empty. I have to "erase" the disk with the utility program then it shows up in the selection list. It then started downloading. After several hours it rebooted and presented the flashing folder question mark icon. Apparently this is it's cute way of saying there's not boot disk. After much reading someone mentioned it doesn't like doing this over wifi so i plugged it into the router. This completed in about an hour and resulted in a successful boot to OS X. yay!!

So now I'm a Mac expert

And some mistakes you won't make again. LOL!!! Restores over wireless have never worked properly in my experience, irrespective of the OS. And I'm no fan of full disk image backups either over wireless.

 

[altrenda]

Glad you got it sorted out.
Once you get past the fact that Macs and Windows do things differently, and treat them accordingly, things go much smoother.

As one who works on more Macs than Windows, everytime I have to do a clean reinstall of Windows I cringe. At least now you aren't going through the several hours of updates, and can get on with reinstalling the programs.