Upgrading Macintosh Hard Drives

I used to know all the tricks to upgrading Macintosh hard drives, but since OS X, I haven’t had to worry about doing a hard drive exchange. in fact, my last three system upgrades have been resolved with new machines, not with new processor cards or new hard drives or more RAM.

This week, however, I ran into a system that was just flat out of disk space, and because the system had no room to add another internal drive, a hard drive swap was the only solution.

I quickly found the tool I needed to accomplish this task: Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich Software. Carbon Copy Cloner is essentially a graphical front end to a set of scripts that will take care of copying data from one HD to another while preserving all the UNIX guts so that the system is bootable and has all the correct permissions.

Here’s the process I went through to get the drive duplicated:

• Took the new drive and installed it into an external FireWire disk enclosure.

• Connected the external drive to the Mac and split the 200GB drive into two partitions – one with the same name as the drive being copied (Macintosh HD), the other with a different name.
• Booted from an OS 10.4 install DVD and installed OS 10.4 onto the second partition on the external drive (not Macintosh HD).
• Booted from the new system on the external drive.
• Ran Software Update to make sure the latest OS pieces were running on the external boot drive.
• Ran Carbon Copy Cloner and transferred the data from Macintosh HD (the internal one) to Macintosh HD (the external one).
• Opened the Startup Disk tool and rebooted to Macintosh HD on the external drive.
• Walked through the system to make sure all the software and documents were where they were supposed to be and all worked as it did before.
• Shut the system down and replaced the internal drive with the external drive.
• Booted from the new internal drive and verified proper operation one last time.

The entire process took about 2 hours for a 40GB drive that was 97% full.