Just curious what the best way to do this would be.
I have a MacPro, OS X 10.5.6, 2x2.66 GHz Dual-Core Xeon, 9 GB RAM with the following disks installed:
Startup 250 GB
Internal Bay 2 - 1 TB
Internal Bay 3 - 500 GB
Internal Bay 4 - 750 GB
I would like to swap out my startup disk for a 1 GB, and copy all the current contents over. What’s the most painless way to do this? Can I clone the drive? Can I use something in Disk Utility? I have an external SATA drive dock, if that helps.
Also, I seem to recall when I bought the Mac, the internal capacity was rated at 3 TB. This will take me slightly over 3. Is this really a problem? Can I not, say, have 4 1.5 TB internal drives in this sucker?
Yes, Disk Utility can do this nicely. Use the misleadingly named “restore” function to copy the entire drive to the new one. You’ll need to yank a drive to make room for the new one temporarily. Format it as HFS Extended.
Awesome! Thanks. So, swap out one of the old disks, use disk utility to copy startup to New Startup, and then take out the original Startup disk, replace it with the new one, and all should start up normally? (Obviously, with powering the computer on and off at appropriate points.) Do you know anything about that 3 TB limit? I think that was in place when the largest internal drives were 750 GB.
Just a tip: from my experience with Macs and multiple hard drives, there seems to be a small speed benefit to having a hard drive with nothing but the system on it. You might want to move the startup disk to the 500 GB and keep the 1 TB new one for data or applications.
The only thing to add is , you need to format the New Startup drive first.
Also, it might be a good idea to do all this while booted from an OS X install DVD. That way there are no open files on the drive you are copying.
The maximum file and volume sizes for Tiger and later is 8 ExaBytes (800 TeraBytes), which should be enough to hold you for a while.
(I figured it wouldn’t be a problem, but the Apple literature said something like 4 internal bays, up to a total capacity of 3 TB. Didn’t make much sense to me, but that’s what it said.)
I bought mine when this was the stated limit, too. I’m pretty sure that that’s just because that was the largest kit that Apple sold at the time. The specs for the system were updated in January 2008 (interestingly, slightly before the machine was actually released), and now lists 1TB drives as OK for the expansion slots (“up to 4 TB”).
I’m sure it will support larger ones, too, but Apple doesn’t sell them, so there’s no “kit” number, and I presume it’s just easier to list the maximum size you can get with all Apple parts. I’ve got 1.5 TB drives attached to mine now, but they’re in external cases (Backup and transfer), and I can’t recall if I ever had any of them inside.
Well, it seems to have worked. I say “seems” because when I compare the two hard drives, the new one doesn’t have a couple of folders: /usr and/ bin (and some other one I’m forgetting) are on old Macintosh HD but not on new Macintosh HD. It boots. All my programs seem to be working, but when I first started up Photoshop, it gave me some sort of error about not have sufficient access privileges for some color folder. It doesn’t show that error now, though, it seems. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the exact error. Otherwise, everything seems to be working fine, and the Mac seems to be much happier with all the extra free disk space.
Should I be concerned about these missing folders? Or are they just hidden? When I click on the Finder and go Go to Folder > /usr, it opens up fine.
Thanks. I’m going to do that right now. Why aren’t they hidden on the old drive? Did I somehow reveal them?
I must admit, I’m very happy at how painless this was. I was afraid I was going to have to reinstall OS X on the new drive and manually import everything or otherwise use some sort of migration or cloning utility. Now I have an extra bootable OS X drive, always nifty and something I probably should have had anyway.
OK, ran permissions repair and got a bunch of “ACL Missing On…errors.” (I don’t want to count them, but let’s just say a slew, as in over 50). Also some “Warning: SUID file [path name] has been modified and will not be repaired” messages. Need I be concerned?
Warning: SUID file “System/Library/Filesystems/AppleShare/afpLoad” has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file “usr/bin/setregion” has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file “System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Install.framework/Versions/A/Resources/runner” has been modified and will not be repaired.
Warning: SUID file “System/Library/Printers/IOMs/LPRIOM.plugin/Contents/MacOS/LPRIOMHelper” has been modified and will not be repaired.
There is lots of debate on which cloning/disk copy/backup tools copy all of the necessary OS X cruft along with the files. I’m not sure about what’s going on in your case, but it might be caused by missing little bits of files here and there.
Here’s a somewhat old link that provides a good idea of the issues involved.
If I were to do this, I would probably reach for the free tool Carbon Copy Cloner.
Before any backup/restore, you might want to rename the old drive to something like “ORIGINAL” and the new one to “NEW” or something like that, so that they are obviously different when you are messing around with the restore tool.
I ran it through a bunch of disk utilities (Disk Repair gave me an error, so I booted in single-user mode and ran fsck–everything came out peachy. Then I ran Disk Warrior’s suite of stuff; everything came out okay. Well, there was one thing, some unexpected character error in the Preference List in Library/Preferences.) Everything’s running fine, so I’m not going to worry about it and Disk Utility now says the volume appears to be okay.