MBP HDD Upgrade - Cloning disk?

Kona* · 7 Mar 2011 at 14:03

Hey,

I've ordered a WD Scorpio Black (as I can't afford a huge SSD yet

) to put in my MBP, ideally I'd like to clone my existing OSX install rather than doing a full re-install. Is this possible by using the recovery feature on the OSX install disk? I've found some guides but I wanted to make sure it was as simple as putting the new HDD in an external USB caddy, booting from the Snow Leopard disk, select recovery, point source at existing Macintosh HD and point destination at the WD Scorpio in the USB caddy and then replacing the existing HDD with the new, cloned HDD?

In theory it should work, but I wanted to check that I didn't need to partition the disk/repair permissions/etc.

Thanks

hyper_piper45 · 7 Mar 2011 at 14:13

You can clone the hard drive but I would not do it with the recovery feature on the OSX disk.

Instead use Carbon Copy Cloner. I have used this a few times before and it works quickly and simply.

Kona* · 7 Mar 2011 at 20:59

hyper_piper45 said:
You can clone the hard drive but I would not do it with the recovery feature on the OSX disk.

Instead use Carbon Copy Cloner. I have used this a few times before and it works quickly and simply.

Thanks for the tip - looks far easier than using the repair method

MagicBoy · 7 Mar 2011 at 23:11

On the other hand, I tried Carbon Copy Cloner and had all sorts of problems with permissions going repeatedly pear shaped and beachballs in OSX on the new drive.

Ended up doing a clean install of OS X onto the new disk followed by a Time Machine restore via Migration Assistant. DVD was 10.6.0, so a quick install of the latest Combo update and all was back to normal and working perfectly.

Kona* · 9 Mar 2011 at 11:08

Thanks for the input chaps. I used CCC to clone my HDD last night and it appears to have worked fine, had a little brown pants moment half way through the clone when our cooker tripped the house electric so I had to start all over again