My wife's 2008-era MacBook had a 250GB hard drive. Evidence suggests the hard drive is now dead. (It was running slow over the past few weeks and now, when the computer boots, it just spins.) There's a (hopefully) complete Time Machine backup in her office, where I rigged up an IOMega MiniMax as her backup disk / USB hub. She'd plug in one cord to make her printer, keyboard, and mouse all start working along with the backups, so I'm reasonably confident the backups are good. Hopefully, this experience will be far less painful than the last time she had a hard drive die, for which there were no backups. That was no fun.

I bought a new hard drive (750GB, 5400 rpm, $100 -- ahhh the march of progress) and my rough plan is to first reinstall the machine with 10.7 (since I've got the image laying around -- I still haven't migrated anything in my life to 10.8). After that, I'll attempt to restore her apps and home directory from the backup.

Anybody done something like this before? Any advice or tips and tricks?

Yeah, don't bother pre-installing the OS. Just boot from DVD or other external device and then restore straight from the Time Machine backup to the new drive. Then reboot and you should be back exactly where you left off.

Her machine was running 10.6, so I'm planning on using this as an excuse to move her to 10.7. Does that change your advice?

Further details: the old disk is definitely bad. If I connect it to another computer with a USB/SATA adapter, the disk gets far enough that I can see "Macintosh HD" but if I try to actually open it, it just sits and spins for a minute before responding. I did "repair disk" on it, but this didn't change anything. It still runs slowly, if at all.

This suggests that the bad disk is the fundamental problem I need to fix, right? Not so fast. I now have the new hard drive, unformatted, installed in the laptop along with a USB boot stick. The machine noticed the boot stick and let me select it, but after that it ran for a few seconds only to display the dreaded "circle with a slash" rather than the Mac logo. This suggests that something else is wrong. Perhaps.

Again, advice is welcome here.

I'm surprised you didn't spring for an 256gb SSD for an additional $70, all the cool kids are doing it

It's a four year old machine. I'm assuming that Apple will announce some awesome new kit at next week's press conference and my wife will get her boss to buy her one of these new things. Assuming we're looking at multiple weeks for delivery, that's how long I need to keep the old machine running. After that, it's job becomes "random backup / utility machine". I wanted to spend as little money as possible on this project.

Meanwhile, I'm now trying to install OS X directly on the hard drive to make it bootable (instructions). We'll see if this works any better.

The stock advice when dealing with hard drives is to connect it to a known-working SATA port on a known-good machine, and read the S.M.A.R.T. data/logs off of it to see if the drive is good or not.

Eg. (Linux): smartctl -a /dev/sdX

Strangely, my Mac reported that the drive doesn't do SMART. It said the same thing for the new drive. I figure the USB to SATA adapter I'm using isn't too bright.

Could be. Or you may need to tell the S.M.A.R.T. utility to use "SAT passthru" to get the commands through to the drive.

Edit: that's the -d flag for smartctl -- see the manpage for possible parameters.

Eg. smartctl -d sat -a /dev/sdX

None of my USB enclosures work with SMART unfortunately.

With regards to the upgrade path... If you want an upgrade install, follow the advice I mentioned first, which is do the restore and verify the system is working (as it was on the older OS) before the update to 10.7.

If you want a clean install, then do the 10.7 install and then just migrate your apps and data/settings from the Time Machine backup using the migration assistant and some manual copying where necessary.

If the system isn't booting properly I'm not sure what the next steps are that you should take. Try all the obvious first round stuff like clearing PRAM and maybe last resort reset the SMC.

Hopefully Tom will read this and have additional advice about that system.

Current status: pre-installing OS X on the bare drive then transplanting it into the laptop worked. It booted correctly. The next step is downloading all the updates then doing the migration assistant tool. Slow, but at least it's all proceeding without show stopping failures.

Everything is working properly again. Yee haw.

One more tip: Make a new complete Time Machine backup without destroying the previous one - that will give you the option of a full restore to either OS (just in case) until you've had more time to verify absolutely everything is hunky dory.

I think this should "just work" if you use the same TM drive. You can use another drive temporarily to be safe if you prefer.

For the record, there's a fantastic third-party web site that's all about Time Machine, which led me to the proper use of the tmutil command line. I was able to reconnect the new machine to the old backups, which wouldn't have worked right out of the box.

Overall, this experience was radically less painful than what I endured when my wife's 2007 machine had a dead hard drive and we had no backup. I don't understand why the machine was unhappy with my 10.7 bootable USB stick, but at least swapping in a pre-installed drive did the trick.

Now we just have to see what goodies Apple will be announcing tomorrow (?) that will be able to properly replace this machine.

At least with 10.7, it should have since its still the same machine (can't remember how 10.6 handled it). In my experience, the first attempt to use the disk will display a prompt allowing reuse or to wipe and start fresh. Though my setup uses a network disk for Time Machine, which works a little differently.

Bookmarking that site to read later, been wanting to read more in depth on the changes in 10.8. Snapshots now also use the hard drive space in the machine, and get moved over to the Time Machine disk when connected. Really handy to retain the versioning backup aspect if you have the local space.

That makes sense. Of course her boss lets her keep the old one, then you might want this 40gb Intel SSD.

Damn SSDs are starting to get cheap, well as long as you don't need a lot of space and are satisfied with an older model.