
Here's a great visual guide to the steps below: Step 2: Removing the Hard Drive from the Mac If you didn't receive a nasty message on step 5 saying the Disk was corrupt, to back up your files and such, good on ya! Try some Canadian troubleshooting - When in doot (doubt) Reboot! If this completes successfully, click Repair Disk Permissions NOTE This may solve your problem. Click the Verify Disk Permissions button.

Do this until there are no errors or (like me) you receive a message saying that the disc couldn't be repaired. Click the Repair Disk button that will only appear after you click Verify. Click the Verify Disk button in the Disk Utilities.Select your drive on the left navigation panel (It's probably already selected).After you've selected a language preference, Select the Disk Utility item in the list of utilities.Continue holding the keys until the Recovery Utility prompts you to select a language (Grey Screen) **NOTE:**You may have to hold the keys for up to two minutes. Hold down the Command+R keys as you start the device.Just in case you pull off the rubber coating, you'll need a case removal tool like you use to replace a cell phone screen.Recommend: A cold beer and a lot of patience.New Hard drive that is compatible with Mac.Mac running OSX Lion or later (prior versions didn't have the recovery partition).I've had little to no success with USB powered devices.

Be sure to get one with external power source.

I did most of this from memory, so I may have messed up a label here or there. This is probably overkill on instructions, but there are PC people out there who may try to help out the (much more) rare critical Mac issue. Hopefully I diagnosed a bad hard drive correctly (I'll provide my method) and I hope this helps someone out there. Being a 1 Mac household and an IT professional who has only supported PCs, I had a challenging time trying to figure out how to reload OSX after my husband's Mac hard drive died.
