Chosen Solution
I have a late 2008 aluminum MacBook. The hard drive was failing so I bought a replacement and cloned the original. Before I put it in I made sure it was working with a SATA to USB adapter. However, when I put it in it gave me the flashing question mark, so I made sure again that it worked externally and it did. Here is where it gets funky, I think oh crap I broke the cable but before I go a buy a new one I’ll put the original hard drive in and it boots up fine. So the new hard drive works fine but won’t read internally. And I know its not the Mac because as I said the original still works in it. (On phone so I apologize for grammar)
If you have the proper drive then you should only need to alter it to be your boot drive. With the new drive installed reboot your system and press the Option (⌥) key which allows you to gain access to the startup manager so you can select your new drive to boot up from. Now go into your Systems Preferences settings Startup Disk and set it as your boot drive and restarting. That should do it. Reference: Mac startup key combinations I really don’t recommend cloning any more. It was fine with older OS-X releases like Lion (as long as you didn’t have any corruptions in the drive), but todays OS’s are very different! I haven’t used any cloning software for systems drives for quite a few years. Instead I use Apples supplied tools TimeMachine & Migration Assistant (which fires off at the end of the OS installer. Remember you carry over all of the junk your system has built up over the years. Doing a fresh OS install and the migrating your stuff over is the only real way to shed-off all of the junk.
