Attack of the Clones!

Ok Mac guru's, I've got what is probably a simple question but I haven't been able to find the answer yet. A friend of mine is upgrading the hd in his Mac from 320gb to 500gb and I'm thinking the easiest way to do this is just to clone his current drive to the new one. What I'm wondering though is can I just use the Disk Utility restore option to copy his 320gb to the 500gb and then just put the new 500gb drive I copied to directly into the Mac? Most of what I've seen is that people clone with Disk Utility to an external drive and then restore back to the new hd. I'd like to skip this step by making a copy of the current drive to the new one if it will work this way. I think it would but I'm not sure. Anyone else have any experience doing it this way or any downfalls to this method?

what you have described is the cloning process.

clone internal to external, swap drives, done.

I would suggest SuperDuper over Disk Utility for the clone.

Yea I mean I figured thats how it works, It just seems that what I was reading it creates a disk image and seemed somehow confusing to me, forgive the ignorance here. I couldn't find anything about someone who had done that, clone to external and then place that into the Mac. (most copy to external and then copy back to new interal) Thanks for the info though.... And is SuperDuper more efficient or something? I thought using disk utility would be ok or any reason I shouldn't?

Disk Utility will be fine. SuperDuper has more flexibility when doing other types of backups. Once the initial clone is complete SuperDuper can perform incremental updates copying only files that have been changed.

SuperDuper is a bit easier, no Disk images or anything to worry about, it just clones the drive, and you can whack it into the Macbook, zero hassle.

I am a big fan of just using Disk utility for this. You dont have to deal with diskimages at all. Just drag your current drive to the top box and the drive you are going to into the bottom box and press restore.

Disk utility will be fine as others have said. One additional step I'd suggest is after making the copy, shut down and boot holding the OPTION key down. That'll give you the chance to select the boot volume and the new disk should be offered as a choice. Select it and let the boot proceed. That way the new disk can be checked out before doing the physical swap.

Carbon Copy Cloner does the same as Superduper, but is free.

Walt_Hutchens said:

Disk utility will be fine as others have said. One additional step I'd suggest is after making the copy, shut down and boot holding the OPTION key down. That'll give you the chance to select the boot volume and the new disk should be offered as a choice. Select it and let the boot proceed. That way the new disk can be checked out before doing the physical swap.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that reminder Walt. I should have mentioned that in my previous post. Booting from your clone at least once is a good idea any time you clone a drive. Continue the entire boot process rather than stopping at the login window. I did a clone once that would get as far as the login window then not accept my password. I didn't discover the problem till I needed the clone.

Well its been a while but I did eventually get around to cloning with Disk Utility. The clone worked great, however I did hit a snag. (Good thing I made a Time Machine backup before I did this) I booted from the usb hd with the option key and the system loaded up just fine and everything worked from the external, but thats when the problem started. I went to shut down and waited for it to completely power off and then i removed the usb drive. When I went to restart with the current drive, it would not boot from the internal drive anymore. It would begin to go to the white screen with the Apple logo and then immediately cut off. I tried several more times and the same issue. When i would plug the external back in I could still boot from the external, but no luck using the internal. I eventually had to restore the internal with Time Machine. Anyone else ever have this happen or is it just a freak issue?

If you Google Disk Restore problems you will find out it is not that reliable. IMHO best way is SuperDuper to external, boot from that and run repair Permissions, and then transfer over as the internal. For the registration fee of $29 you get access to Smart Backup which takes four or five minutes each week to back up OS to external.