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Replacing internal hd in imac

excalibur313

excalibur313

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 7, 2003
780
5
Cambridge, MA
I just bought a 320 gb serial hard drive to replace an 80gb hard drive in my imac. I loaded disk utility and transferred all the data to the 320gb using an external case but when I physically switched it out, it doesn't boot from it. It just has the folder with the question mark. Why is this and how can I fix it? I'm now trying to load off the old drive using an external case but I cannot remember the shortcut that allows me to load off the external. How can I do that? Thanks a lot for your help.

The drive is usb, which I've read can be a limitation but I have leopard on an external drive that I'm able to easily boot into by just selecting it in system preferences. I basically just want to do the same thing but by pressing a key on boot up instead of selecting it in system preferences and then restarting.
 
excalibur313 said:
I just bought a 320 gb serial hard drive to replace an 80gb hard drive in my imac. I loaded disk utility and transferred all the data to the 320gb using an external case but when I physically switched it out, it doesn't boot from it. It just has the folder with the question mark. Why is this and how can I fix it? I'm now trying to load off the old drive using an external case but I cannot remember the shortcut that allows me to load off the external. How can I do that? Thanks a lot for your help.

The drive is usb, which I've read can be a limitation but I have leopard on an external drive that I'm able to easily boot into by just selecting it in system preferences. I basically just want to do the same thing but by pressing a key on boot up instead of selecting it in system preferences and then restarting.
Click to expand...

Option key, well thats how I do it at least.

I don't know if this applies to you, but I remember reading somewhere you can only boot from the firewire? I may be wrong though, so don't hold it to me!

The steps I would go to putting a new hard drive is put the new drive in the iMac then the old drive in the external (assuming you can boot from the external).. Then I would boot to the external, format the new harddrive to NFS+ then use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the external drive to the internal drive.

Added: Also if u use Carbon Copy Cloner make sure the box that says make bootable is *ticked*
 
Ohhh okay so the intel macs can but the g5s can't. I wonder why the disk utility didn't correctly restore the old drive to the new drive. So if I can't boot from the external then I'll want to switch it then use carbon cloner to clone the old to the new and then switch it again?
 
Well I used that program recommended above and it worked perfectly! It seemed like disk utility didn't make a bootable image of the drive but that other program did. Thanks for all of the help!
 
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