08-21-2008, 12:32 PM

The Intro:

Hello to everyone at MacForums! I've been using these very useful forums for the last two years ever since I made the switch.

After a rather unsuccessful scouring of the net I couldn't find out if upgrading a MacBook's hard drive using SuperDuper installed on a different MacBook is possible.

The Situation:

I'm a student and for my year out on placement I've decided to start up my own computer repair business being "the mac guy" and my business partner being "the PC guy".

Today we received our first call about MacBook hard drive upgrade.
Now if the customer was using Leopard it would be a piece of cake because I would sell the customer an external hard drive and use Time Machine to do the rest.
Being in the market I can predict this sort of situation where MacBook owners with Tiger want to upgrade from their 60GB drives is going occur more frequently as my business's turnover increases.
Many of the articles about upgrading a MacBook hdd recommend SuperDuper and it looks like a cracking piece of kit! However I don't want to have to make my customers buy SuperDuper every time. I want to buy it and use it to make the deal more attractive to customers because I don't have to charge them $30 odd per purchase.

The Setup:

I own a MacBook of my own. I would like to remove the original 60GB hdd from the customers Mac and replace it with a 160GB (best price point in the UK at the moment). I would like to put SuperDuper on my MacBook and then set up two cadddies (I have too many of these ) plugged into my two USB ports, with both the new 160GB and older 60GB drives in each caddy respectively. (sorry about the grammar)
From here is it possible to copy exactly the data from the older 60GB drive to the newer 160GB so that it becomes a usable (bootable) drive? I ask this because I see that SuperDuper will copy the original partition of 60GB which can then be put it on the 160GB via USB. Does that mean the customer will be left with two partitions of 60GB and 100GB on the new drive?
I am sure that SuperDuper has been designed so that it doesn't give you this problem but I would like to have my doubts cleared.

The ideal outcome:

I would like the customer to walk away with identical MacBook to the one they brought to me apart from the capacity increase on the internal HDD from 60GB to 160GB. Settings/Preferences/Files/Folders/Playlists/Softwares Trials - Everything 100% as they gave it to me.

Thank you in advance for reading this long post. I have to be sure.
Thank you in advance for any help you provide.

08-21-2008, 01:04 PM

SuperDuper is actually free. There is a pay-for version that allows incremental backups, but the standard version is free.

What I would do would be to purchase a SATA/PATA to USB adapter. These run around $20. Then boot the Mac that you intend to upgrade the hard drive on. Attach the adapter to the new hard drive and plug it in via USB. Install and start SuperDuper. Have SuperDuper do a full backup from the internal hard disk to the new hard disk - be sure that SuperDuper is set to make the destination drive bootable (I believe this is a default). Then, shut the machine down and swap hard disks. Mission accomplished.

08-21-2008, 01:30 PM

Thank you. Next time I'll be sure to get my facts straight.
Out of interest, just say SuperDuper wasn't free would one be able to transfer the data from one hard disk to another using a program like SuperDuper! from another Mac? It will be useful to know as much as I can.

08-21-2008, 02:23 PM

Originally Posted by paddington

Thank you. Next time I'll be sure to get my facts straight.
Out of interest, just say SuperDuper wasn't free would one be able to transfer the data from one hard disk to another using a program like SuperDuper! from another Mac? It will be useful to know as much as I can.

I'm sure you could, but don't confuse SuperDuper with something like Ghost for PCs. SuperDuper merely clones from one disk to another - it doesn't create a disk image. So, to do that, you'd need to hook both the source and destination drive up to the same machine and clone from one externally connected device to the other (meaning it will be both slow input and output, resulting in longer cloning times).

08-21-2008, 02:38 PM

Another solution would be to stick the old drive in a firewire external chassis and boot off the OS X install discs and when prompted use target disk mode to copy the old data from the old drive to the new one.

08-21-2008, 05:38 PM

Or Migration Assistant.

08-26-2008, 08:33 AM

Awesome! Thank you for all your help - I'll post back once I've done this to say how it goes.

09-08-2008, 02:28 PM

It's been a while but the local PC shop that outsources to me tried to do the job by ghosting it and failed. They didn't copy the drive as they should've (they didn't use Macs at all and many of the permissions were screwed up so the customer came back very disgruntled that he couldn't print anything.

I took all the advice given above and used SuperDuper! which worked just as expected. I wanted to get a FireWire caddy but I could only get my hands on a USB 2.0 one. The transfer of 60GB from the old drive to the new 160GB drive took about 2.5 hours. After that it was a matter of just renaming the root directory "Macintosh HD" and putting it in the new computer. The PC shop had called the root directory "Untitled 1". I don't think that the services are going to find a user under the name of untitled 1 and was the reason why everything broke. SuperDuper! seem to assume the original name of the drive so I just renamed it at the end.

Everything that didn't work before that was recorded by the customer worked just fine. It mostly seemed to be printing issues...mostly.


Thanks again for all your help people!!

09-08-2008, 02:34 PM

Originally Posted by paddington

It's been a while but the local PC shop that outsources to me tried to do the job by ghosting it and failed. They didn't copy the drive as they should've (they didn't use Macs at all and many of the permissions were screwed up so the customer came back very disgruntled that he couldn't print anything.

Note that Ghost (and its ilk) are specifically geared toward Windows filesystems. I'm surprised it didn't clue them into the fact that there would be problems when it did its cursory glance at the structure of the disk. My guess is they forced it to do a sector-by-sector copy, which again won't help with the Mac-equivalent of an MBR.