Is your MacBook Pro, Air or iMac running pathetically slow or affected by an illegal application causing too many troubles to handle? Well, restoring iMac, MacBook Air/Pro to its original settings can help you eliminate sluggishness, remove malware or virus infections and prepare the Macintosh HD for a fresh installation of OS X.
The process of resetting a Mac works perfectly on any recent OS X. Since MacBook Pro is a popular Apple Notebook; we are exclusively mentioning it in this entire article.
How to Restore and Recover MacBook Pro/Air & iMac Hard Drive Data
Restoring your Mac to factory setting implies that you are ready to format (hard – format) your Macintosh HDD (startup disk) and remove all of its content, installed applications, widgets, and the user-defined settings so that the MacBook Pro is rolled back to its original state.
Mac hard drive restoration is a productive activity. However, you must first backup your hard drive i.e. Macintosh HDD to another external hard disk. Always rely on a 2 -way Mac backup strategy so that your data isn’t dependent upon a single backup disk.
- Create the latest backup of your Mac’s Macintosh HD with Time Machine application
- Clone your Macintosh HD to an external hard drive using a Mac clone application
How to Restore MacBook Pro
Apple provides a very intuitive process for formatting Macintosh HD and restoring Mac to its original settings. Hope you have properly backed up the data on Macintosh HD, and it is safe to follow below steps:
Step #1. Restart/Turn off MacBook Pro and press Power button to switch it on again.
Step #2. Once MBP starts, immediately press OPTION key to bringing forth the startup drive menu.
Step #3. Once startup drive menu is loaded, you will see following available disks – Macintosh HD, Recovery HD. You may also see other disk drives such as BootCamp Partition as per your installation.
Step #4. Select Recovery HD to upload. After few seconds of delay, you will see that OS X Utilities have been loaded on MacBook Pro screen.
Step #5. OS X Utilities offers four options to be performed on Mac hard disk drive:
- Restore from Time Machine Backup
- Reinstall OS X
- Get Help Online
- Disk Utility
Step #6. Click Disk Utility from the list of given options. Once through, select your Macintosh HD from the Disk Utility tray and go to Erase tab. You must keep:
- Drive Format – “Mac OS X (Journaled.)”
- Drive Name – “Macintosh HD.”
Step #7. Click Erase to format the selected Macintosh HDD. Formatting will remove all existing files on the Macintosh HD, which is why a prior backup of Macintosh HD should be done.
Step #8. Let the Disk Utility to complete the erase process.
Note: If you are looking to sell or donate your MacBook Pro then you can choose secure erase through Disk Utility << Erase, which will wipe off your confidential data through 0’s, 1’s, 3 Passes or 7 Passes. Data once wiped will be unrecoverable.
Reinstall OS X on MacBook Pro
Done with hard drive formatting through Recovery Mode, it is time to reinstall OS X. Go back to the main screen of OS X Utilities and this time select the second option, which is: Reinstall Mac OS X
Clicking this will begin reinstallation of the OS X, which you had earlier. For instance, if your Mac had OS X 10.10 before formatting then Recovery Mode will re-install OS X 10.10 on the Macintosh HD. The newly installed OS X will be having the basic set of applications that are bundled with OS X by default. It won’t be having any user-generated data.
Note: This completes the MacBook Pro Restoration procedure.
Data Recovery on Mac Hard Drive
Formatting MacBook Pro hard drive is a destructive process, and it might happen that the process gets stopped in between causing snags. Or once MBP is successfully formatted, the backup disks go corrupt causing the painful experience of data loss. Likewise, there could be “n” number of instances of data losses on MacBook Pro while restoration or after a successful restore.
Solution!
To overcome data losses on a Mac, there exists a bunch of Mac Data Recovery Application that successfully mounts scan and recover files from Macintosh HD. On a dead Mac or an inaccessible MBP HDD, the utility will first boot up the MacBook Pro so that Macintosh HD is Read/Scan and recovered.
Jignesh Padhiyar is the co-founder of iGeeksBlog.com, who has a keen eye for news, rumors, and all the unusual stuff around Apple products. During his tight schedule, Jignesh finds some moments of respite to share side-splitting content on social media.