# Hard Drive replacement for Macbook 13" A1181



## revolution2008 (Dec 27, 2010)

I'm having trouble figuring out what kind of hard drive to buy to replace my old one which isn't working anymore. 

Also I want to recover the files off of my old hard drive so I want to know if this is possible: install osx on an external hard drive and boot from it while the faulty one is still in the laptop then drag and drop the files I want from my old one.
Will that even work or is it possible? 

Thanks for helping out.


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## DeltaMac (Dec 27, 2010)

You can look for a 2.5-inch SATA. The largest capacity drives (1TB) might be too thick for the MacBook, but that leaves you with plenty of choices for a replacement drive.
Anything SATA on this page will be fine, for example: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/
It also has enclosure kits, so you can try what you asked about: Good drive in an external case. Boot to your installer, and install OS X on that external drive. Then boot to that disk, and try to copy whatever files are available on your old drive to your new drive. If the old drive is close to working, you can try Disk Utility, and do a Restore from the old drive to the new drive. That might take a couple of hours, even with a working drive. If it appears to start the restore process, you can wait it out, as long as you don't get any errors or lockups. The process can take several hours, or longer.


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## revolution2008 (Dec 27, 2010)

Thanks for the help and the link!


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## revolution2008 (Dec 27, 2010)

Before I order I want to make sure that this one will fit and work in my macbook 13" A1181 model
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0A57913/

I just need some verification, thanks.


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