Chosen Solution
My hard drive failed on my early 2006 MacBook Pro, so I replaced it (myself with your instructions). I had Leopard on my previous hard drive, and I have previously upgraded memory. I have a Time Machine, so I thought there would be a way to transfer my files and operating system to my new hard drive. I don’t have installation disks. I do have another Mac in the house. What is my best solution? Thanks!
Is the other Mac running Leopard as well? Depending on the size of the harddrives, you may be able to clone the working Mac’s drive to the new drive. I’d use a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to accomplish that. Note that your other Mac must also be Intel based for this to work, as PPC Macs use a different boot record than Intel machines. Once that has finished cloning, you should in theory be able to boot from the new drive once it is in your MacBook. At that point, I’d create a new user account with admin privileges. Log in to that account, and delete the other account. Then, fire up Migration Assistant and use it to transfer your data from the Time Machine backup. Cheers!
