How To Clone Your Mac Hard Drive

Written By: Frostedblue On: 04/04/2010Time(09:45:29)

This guide will take you through the (step by step) process of cloning your Apple Macintosh Hard Drive. Why would you want to clone your drive i hear you ask? Well, when upgrading your hard drive of course. If you’ve got lots and lots of data or apps that you simply cannot do without, or reinstall, cloning is your answer. Heres how...

What you will need:

1, Add Drive To Hard Drive Enclosure

This should be a straight forward task and one that should be fully documented, supplied with the hardware.


2, Connect Hard Drive Enclosure To Mac

Boot up your Mac and open up Disk Utility, this can be found in Applications > Utilities. Connect your newly fitted Hard drive enclosure to your Mac, via USB. Switch on the enclosure and your Mac should detect a new disk and display this message: The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.

Click “Initialize...”

3, Rename Your Primary Macintosh HD

Remember, you are creating a clone of your main OSX drive. This will usually be the “Macintosh HD”.

It is far easier to rename your HD if it is located upon your desktop (if no HD icons are showing then don’t worry, open “Finder”, goto Finders Preferences and add all HD’s as desktop items).

On your desktop, click on your “Macintosh HD” icon twice, not to open it but to rename it, just like you would a file. Now rename it to “Macintosh HD OLD”.

You may have noticed that on the example above, there are more than one HD drives. This is because they have been partitioned. One drive split up into many. This guide will only be covering your main OSX HD drive as most Mac hard drive’s come unpartitioned from factory.


4, Formatting Your NEW Drive

In “Disk Utility” click, in the left pane, your NEW hard drive icon (The orange icon) and click on “Erase” in the top bar.

MAKE SURE YOU ARE SELECTING THE NEW UNFORMATTED HARD DRIVE AND NOT YOUR CURRENT SYSTEM HD TO AVOID DATA LOSS

Under “Name:” enter “Macintosh HD NEW” and select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in the drop down menu. Double check that you are NOT going to be formatting/wiping your existing HD before clicking “Erase”.

When Finished:

Your Mac will ask you if you wish to use the new, freshly formatted drive, in the enclosure as a “Time Machine” drive (Apple’s backup service). Click “Don’t use”. You should now close “Disk Utility”.


5, Clone Your Drive

Open up “Carbon Copy Cloner”, we’re using v3.

Now select, as your SOURCE DISK, your old existing “Macintosh HD OLD” and your new “Macintosh HD NEW” as your TARGET DISK.

Select “Cloning Options” as “Backup Everything”.

Once you’re set, click “Clone”. It will most likely ask you for your password. Enter this in correctly then press “OK”.

Your cloning process will now start. This WILL take hours so go away, leave the Mac be and return, to check it, every 30 mins.

After many hours (This will vary dependent on size) your cloning process will be complete. Close “Carbon Copy Cloner” and go back to your Desktop.


6, Rename Your New Macintosh HD

Hopefully you will now have your “Macintosh HD OLD” and “Macintosh HD NEW” drives located on the desktop, if you have not, open Finder > Preferences and check “External Disks”.

IMPORTANT STEP:
Rename your NEW HD to “Macintosh HD” as this is going to be your master hard drive. Failure to rename could result in problems when booting from it.

If you “Get Info” on both disks, you may notice that both HD’s will give different “Used: On Disk” figures. This should be OK. CCC only copies the files that are most necessary. Your Mac should run perfectly fine with all of your personal data intact.

7, Booting Up Your Mac From Your NEW HD

This i must confess is a great feature for us system builders and techie people. “Start Up Disk” under “System Preferences” allows you to choose which disk that you wish to boot from :)

So, we can boot from the NEW HD without even picking up a screw driver. This way we can thoroughly test our copied drive and be sure that all is well.

Select your NEW HD and click “Restart”, your Mac will now boot from your enclosure via USB (OOSB).

Job Done. This drive is now ready to be installed, and it just so happens that we have a couple of guides on how to do just that.