New HDD in Macbook Pro

[wavey]

I don't do macs as a general rule!

So I have here a Macbook Pro 13" Mid 2009 OS 10.11.6 with a 160gb HDD which is almost full, the client also brought in a WD Black 500gb.
I made a time machine backup on my ext HDD and swapped the drives.
Now I'm stuck, I power on & press cmd -r and I get either a folder with a ? or a circle with a diagonal line, same with opt cmd -r
opt shows my ext hdd only, opt cmd -r -p continually restarts the machine.

It's fine with the old drive
What's going on here? Is it me or am I missing something?

 

[wavey]

The WD HDD tests as good in my PC and I get the same issue when I use a SSD. Same result if I format to HSF+

 

[eric76]

Carbon Copy Cloner is the best. It will boot up flawlessly. 30 day trial.

https://bombich.com/

 

[wavey]

Thanks Eric
The client has now taken the mac away but will return in mid June! He has left the WD HDD with me so I do expect him back.
I thought Time Machine was the way to go, but you live and learn.

 

[eric76]

That Mac has a CD-Rom. I usually take it out and install second HD. It's a great way to do daily backups - and it's great for storage. Maybe an SSD for OS and a hard drive for storage.

https://www.amazon.com/Optical-SuperDrive-Adapter-Unibody-2012-etc/dp/B004FM4UGE

 

[wavey]

I've done that a couple of times with laptops (Windows), I'll offer it to him when he returns.

 

[Markverhyden]

A clarification on the recovery mode stuff.

To get into recovery mode use command + R. But there's a dividing line so to speak.

For machines that shipped with OS X 10.7 and later that function is built into the firmware (BIOS). Kind of like Dell's, HP's and others that had/have recovery keys like F11. In the case of those Wintel machines the BIOS then points to a partition on the drive. If the partition is not there it just fails. For Apple machines it initiates a network boot (PXE in the Wintel world) so it downloads the image from Apple.

For machine that shipped before 10.7 that does not exist. If those machines were upgraded to 10.7 or later the upgrade carved out a small recovery partition that did the same thing. That machine probably shipped with 10.6 so it did not have the firmware recovery mode. It was installed during an upgrade to 10.7 on the new recovery partition. So if the installed drive is bare it's not there. The only solution is to have a bootable installer or, even better, a bootable OS X installation. You can burn a bootable installation to an opti disk. You can burn an installer to a USB stick as well as a live OS X system. The advantage of the live system is you can connect to the Internet and download what ever is needed.