Moving a bunch of pictures to a new hard drive (Mac)

[Johnny_L.A]

My coworker’s daughter has a metric buttload of photos. I received this email from her this morning:

I just bought a bigger hard drive today in order to accomodate all of my pictures and they were going to charge me $100 to have it installed. It sounds pretty simple and they said that all I would have to do is get the hard drive in (and I guess there are instructional videos online), install my new software (snowleopard), and then plug in my external hard drive to transfer all of the data over.

I have an external hard drive around here somewhere, and the last time I used it I just plugged it into my PowerBook with a USB cord and saved my videos there. Why would The Daughter have to install Snow Leopard on her new hard drive? Shouldn’t she be able to simply plug it into her MacBook, select all of her pictures, and drag them over to it?

[ZipperJJ]

Looks like a hard drive was bought to use as the new main drive. So you take out the old main drive (presumably with an old OS on it), install the new main drive, install the OS to that and now you basically have a new computer.

All of your old stuff is still there on the old drive, and to access it, you plug it in to the “new computer” and look through the files and move the ones you want over to the new computer.

[Francis_Vaughan]

If you are going to remove the existing hard drive and install a new, larger, one. What you want to do is to ensure that the entire contents of the old drive is available to the OSX installation process when you install on the new disk.

You can do this is one of two ways.

When you remove the old drive, install it in an external drive case. Then you can plug it into the Mac via the USB connection, and access the old disk.

or

Backup the Mac to an external disk drive with Time Machine. The OSX installer can recognise a Time Machine backup, and use its contents. (You should really back up the disk anyway, there is always the possibility something bad may happen, and you lose the only up to date copy of your data.)

Either way, you can get the newly installed OS to grab all of the useful contents from the old drive and install it on the new drive. This isn’t just your pictures, but everything. Including system settings, applications, the lot. The Mac will look identical to the way it did before, but with a bigger disk. You can do this during the OSX installation, or afterwards using the migration assistant.

This process makes upgrading disks, or indeed upgrading to a new machine really easy. (Migration assistant can also access the disk in an old Mac over Firewire, Thunderbold, or Ethernet.)