I bought a new hard drive for my MacBook Pro (2009)

mayer: I did as you said, yet all I get is a white screen after booting thusly. the cursor is there; the trackpad will not move it.

I must mention here the reason for replacing the hard drive. I encountered S.M.A.R.T. errors when trying to boot, meaning that there were snags in that original drive. Now that it’s externalized, I thought I could plug it in and retrieve select files while avoiding the problem areas.

So now that I’ve plugged it in as you directed, there seems to be a struggle internally. The green light flashed rapid red for a minute and back to green, while screen still white. As I type this, the cursor now moves via trackpad.

Do we now change strategy?

Now, I have a 1 TB My Book external hard drive that works like a dream. I surmise that I should be using that instead.

If the old drive was still bootable, switch them. Boot from the internal old drive, then do the set up on the new drive.

I just booted with the My Book, into Disk Utility, no problem. I am following yr steps, but I do not see a GUID option, only different incarnations of Mac OS Extended. If you are still available, I’d love a bit more guidance on this. (It’s the closest I’ve been so far!)

Open Disk Utilities > click on drive you are going to erase > a dialog box will appear > It will list Name Forms and Scheme. Name it whatever you want except the current name of you boot drive > select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) > select GUID Partition Map > now hit erase