FEATURE Keep your old Mac running
Boot from an external drive
How to bring your Mac back to life if the hard drive isn’t working.
The hard drive is one of the most vulnerable parts of an old computer. Moving parts are always vulnerable to wear and tear, and unlike modern solid-state drives (SSDs), the hard drive had to be in motion when data was read from or written to the storage medium.
Another problem with old hard drives is they’re likely to be small. When the first Intel-powered Macs were released, they had as little as 160GB of storage off the shelf for the iMac, and a minuscule 60GB for the Mac mini or MacBook. What can you do with so little storage these days?
If you’re lucky enough to have a Mac that lets you change the hard drive, you can buy a replacement of the same size (almost certainly 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch), and connect it to your Mac using a caddy or a docking station, then clone the current drive to its replacement. You then simply turn off, swap the drives and reboot. Alternatively, set up an external drive as your Mac’s boot drive. If your Mac uses the older PowerPC processor you can only boot it from a FireWire drive, but Intel Macs can be booted from a USB drive.