Question about restoring...

[MK25toLife]

Hello,

I am about to swap about my hard drive on an '07 iMac with a new SSD drive.

Can I restore straight from a time machine back up or do I need to create an image install the OS first?

 

[Weaselboy]

Assuming the Time Machine backup is to a local disk (like USB) you can option key boot to it to get to a recovery screen where you can use Disk Util to format the disk then restore.

 

[MK25toLife]

Assuming the Time Machine backup is to a local disk (like USB) you can option key boot to it to get to a recovery screen where you can use Disk Util to format the disk then restore.

Thanks, can you explain a little bit further what this means? How do I "format the disk"?

 

[Ebenezum]

You can do as Weaselboy suggested, it will work. Downside is that you cant test SSD before installing it and if something goes wrong with restore you have lot of work figuring out what went wrong.

Alternative way which I would suggest is this: Place SSD into external enclosure, format it on Disk Utility (select GUID and Mac Os Extended, Journaled) and clone iMacs drive into SSD. Then boot from it while holding option key, select SSD and see if boots from the SSD.

If it doesn't boot something went wrong. Possibly corrupted OS X install, wrong partition, faulty SSD etc.

If it boots normally you only have to install it into iMac, no need to spend time with Time Machine restoration (which is much slower than cloning).

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks, can you explain a little bit further what this means? How do I "format the disk"?

Once you are in that recovery screen, launch Disk Utility then in go to the erase tab. Now select the new drive in the left column. Then select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in the dropdown and apply that format. Once it is formatted you can quit Disk Utility and click restore.