How do I reformat my Mac's internal hard drive and then recover all of my data?

Question

Update:

How do I reformat my Mac's internal hard drive and then recover all of my data? Will my Mac start up OK once I have reformatted my hard drive? 

I have Time Machine working and it is up to date. 

Answer 1

You probably misunderstood what a reformat is. This blanks the drive without blanking it in a technical sense and effectively no longer starts up without reinstallation and data is scrambled without recognition to those that do do the retrieval business.

Effectively blank to ordinary users, Time Machine is backups tool, I assume you are sure the backs imagery is proper, that's at most what you going to "recover" though I'm a bit confused what is it.

Answer 2

backup everything using time machine or by copying all the files on an external hard drive or flash drive

Answer 3

I think upload to iCloud reformatvthen down your stuff from iCloud

Answer 4

You need to copy all your personal data to a hard drive before formatting your computer

Whenever you format the computer it is returned to it's original factory settings. Before you do the procedure, contact a friend for some help. Even the personnel at Staples or Office depot etc will always help you ..

Answer 5

Formatting the hard drive will delete all data making recovery useless. The proper procedure is to recover the data first then reformat. If the hard drive does not work properly anymore and data can no longer be recovered, there is no point formatting it anymore.

Lesson learned? Do backups. USB flash drives are cheap.

Answer 6

Friend, you haven't got a prayer of doing that successfully. You should have been doing backups all along like the grownups do.

Answer 7

I have a better Idea.

Instead of asking a Computer-related question in this forum,

you should go to the Knitting forum and ask questions about NFL Football.

Answer 8

Save first your important data to external disk before to reformat the HDD.

Like life, to be happy.

Answer 9

1. repost this in the Computers and Internet section.

2. Ignore anything you read on Yahoo Answers and go to a reputable Mac help site or forum.

Answer 10

Since you've made this a religious question

the answer is

Pray very, very hard.