Need to replace a hard drive in a macbook

Solution 1:

1# If I put in a new hard drive, will I have to reinstall an operating system? yes, a new empty hard drive will have to be formatted and the os reinstalled

reboot and hold down the Option key

Choose the “Mac OS X Installer” startup volume from the boot menu

Select “Disk Utility” and choose the hard drive you wish to format, click the “Erase” tab, and then pull down the “Format” menu and select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” as the type, name the drive if you wish

Click the “Erase” button and let the drive format – this is the point of no return

When finished, quit out of Disk Utility and now select the “Install Mac OS X” option from the menu

Choose your freshly formatted hard drive and install Mountain Lion

2# When you buy a mac, do they give you a copy of the OS on disc like buying a windows PC? no, however depending on your mac, post- lion, you can use the recovery mode to download and reinstall the os information about recovery mode

3# If the procedure much different between different flavours of macbook? yes and no, different on different generations of MacBooks, but it is pretty straight forward and easily done link is to change ram, however look it over, and read the useful tips, the hard-drive is right next to the battery also you need to change the hard drive cover held in by screws

Are there any special tools required extra to a small philips-head screwdriver? no not really no unless you dont have any "normal" screwdivers

Solution 2:

1. Yes, the new hard drive is empty. In fact, if it purports to have OS X on it, I would be suspicious. I'm not sure Apple have ever supplied OS X on a separate drive.
2. "Old" laptop Macs (before OS X Lion) were sold with an optical disc. After a certain time most have shipped without an optical drive or a disc to put in it. In that case the internal hard drive (or SSD) was supplied with a recovery partition. You may be able to use Lion or later on a boot-able USB.
3. Yes, you might want to look at iFixit's guides or Apple's support articles.
4. Just Torx screws.