New HDD for MAC

Status
Not open for further replies.

snypercore

Daemon Poster
Messages
743
Location
England
Hi,
Ive pretty recently bought a MacbookPro and I'm about to buy a SSD for it as theres a very cheap deal on one at the moment. Only problem is being an ex windows geek, changing the HDD is pretty standard , id backup and pop in a windows disk, and then re transfer. now this Mac came with lion, which means no recovery disk of any kind, so how can i best upgrade this HDD, ideally closing the current HDD image exactly? with no OSX disk? i considered getting an OSX disk form the usual places but surely i don't need to do that just to pop a new HDD in?

Thanks
 
Could always try creating an image of the drive onto a backup source, and then applying that image onto the SSD (as long as the total data is less than the size of the SSD, anyway). I would recommend CloneZilla to try it out.
 
You don't install CloneZilla. It's a bootable LiveCD (linux based) that makes an exact duplicate of the drive.

I HIGHLY (emphasis on highly) creating an image of the drive first to an external drive, and then from the image to the new drive. I've done a straight disc-to-disc before, but something went wrong during the duplication process, and it messed both drives up. So I learned to do disk-to-image, and then image-to-disk.

Clonezilla live
 
Another alternative, but similar
Connect the SSD to the mac (via a 2.5" external enclosure), download Carbon Copy Cloner (it's free), then clone the current HD straight across to the SSD. Swap the SSD into the mac and you're done.
 
Perfect , thanks guys. I actually already have carbon copy installed as i read previous to posting it was a good solution, just i don't have a caddy at the moment as my "stuff" is in storage, so i think I'm gonna give clonezilla a try , sounds pretty good.

Do Apple not supply any kind of disk then now? i know theres a recovery partition, but obviously in situations like this thats of no use.
 
It's ridiculous hey, even more so in a company environment. The new macs being released don't support any OS older than Lion either, so you're screwed twice over :(
 
I tried clonezilla when I went from my 250GB HDD to my current 640GB one and for some reason it didn't work. Carbon Copy Cloner did do the trick though.

Can you download Lion from the app store? If you're able to do that than you can create a bootable lion disk from the image in the install os lion app.
 
I tried clonezilla when I went from my 250GB HDD to my current 640GB one and for some reason it didn't work. Carbon Copy Cloner did do the trick though.

Can you download Lion from the app store? If you're able to do that than you can create a bootable lion disk from the image in the install os lion app.

It might be worth a try though i wouldn't imagine the app would be an ISO, but better yet its £20+ which i kinda begrudge paying considering i already own a copy of lion, i guess i could wait till snow lion.

Last question though, when making a disk image of a HDD, does the image have to be the same size as the entire disk? e.g.

750 GB HDD with only 128GB used, will the backup image be 750GB or 128GB?

when doing this process on windows I've never bothered with anything like this before like settings/preferences or even OS let alone disk cloning as i usually have the OS and user data on separate disks, so this as well as being mac is very new to me. Thanks in advance
 
Only the space being used is needed for the image. So, if you have 128GB full of data, that is what the image will be.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom