Help me upgrade my wifes Macbook Pro hard drive

Factual Questions
1

Background:
So I am going to update my wife’s laptop hard drive. It is about 4 years old, and frankly, I don’t trust HDs that are older than 4 years. Plus, a bit of speed boost could be helpful. Almost all “how-to” webpages seem concerned with how to install it physically, and that looks pretty easy.

The added difficulty for me is that it is Mid 2010 Macbook Pro (with Mavericks) and I am not a Mac guy.

Problem:
So, I can’t seem to find a straightforward answer on how to get a new OS (or even the old OS) on the new HD with minimal fuss and muss.

Items on hand:

  1. External HD that has been used for Time Machine.
  2. A 16 GB thumb drive
  3. A new laptop hard drive of the correct physical size
  4. Old laptop hard drive (not uninstalled yet)

Discussion:
One page that I saw made me think that if I take the old HD out, put the new one in, plug in the external time machine drive and push some buttons at startup, that the external time machine drive has some recovery capability that will allow me to install Mavericks on the internal drive without any problems. Another page seemed to contradict this. Is the best way? What should I do (without going to a distant genius bar).

2

By far the simplest way is to use another machine.

  1. Get (or borrow) a USB-SATA adapter (they are under $10 on ebay).
  2. Connect the new drive to the adapter, and format it as HFS Extended, Journaled.
  3. Connect your Mac via FireWire or Thunderbolt to the interim Mac using Target mode.
  4. Connect the new drive via the adapter to the interim Mac.
  5. Use Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner on the interim Mac to image the old Hard drive onto the New Hard drive.

Be VERY, VERY, ***VERY!!! careful about which drive is being copied from/to!

Once the copy is done, you can boot off of the new drive and you’re done.

FWIW, I do this all the time.

If you don’t have another machine available, you can make a USB boot stick, replace the drive, then boot from USB and copy the older drive (attached via the USB-SATA adapter) onto the new one.

3

I don’t have another mac around.

How do I make a usb boot stick that will perform this function? Any links?

And this boot stick will allow me to format the new one and copy data from the old one to the new one?

Will it allow me to carbon copy the drives or just move data?
I appreciate the help. Like I said, I am ignorant of Apple world.

4

According to Apple:

  1. Install new drive
  2. Connect external Time Machine drive
  3. Hold option key while booting
  4. Select Time Machine drive as boot device
  5. Recover from Time Machine

Or, follow these instructions to make a recovery USB stick:

ETA: As long as your Time Machine back is okay, you can to a full recovery to the last back up. Time Defaults to hourly backups.

5

When I put a new hard drive in my Mac it was laughably easy. It was over a year ago, so the details are hazy, but it went something like this.

  1. Physically install new drive.
  2. Plug in Time Machine external drive
  3. Turn on computer
  4. Put in original OS disk that came with the machine
  5. Machine said something like “it seems like you’re trying to restore from Time Machine. Is that what you want?”
  6. Click yes. Put in password.
  7. Wait about 3 hours while it loads
  8. Bam. Done. Computer is exactly as it was before, except with a bigger, faster hard drive. All software installed. All website autofills remembered. Even my desktop icons were in the same locations.

Not sure whether #4 is necessary, and you don’t list the original disk in your “Items on Hand.”

6

Alright folks, I’ll see if I can give this a try on Saturday.

Thanks for the help.