Keeping Recovery HD when upgrading hard drive

Hi there,

I have a mid 2010 white macbook and I would like to upgrade my harddrive as I am running tight on space. I am trying to figure out the quickest way of doing this and the only way I can think of at the moment would be to install snow leopard off the disk, run the lion updater then restore from a hard drive. Keep in mind I want to keep the Recovery HD, and I am not sure if just cloning the hard drive will keep it installed.
Suggestions?

Thanks,
Jono

Assuming you have Lion installed at the moment..... There are several different ways, this is just one and I'll preface this with saying you should have a backup of any important data before you start any process like this.

By recovery HD do you mean the recovery partition created by Lion?

Create a Lion install disk.

Install your new hard disk into your Mac.

Put your old hard disk into a USB enclosure.

Use the Lion install disc created earlier to install Lion - no need to install Snow Leopard first - this process will create the recovery partition and install a fresh, clean copy of Lion.

Connect the USB enclosure to your Mac.

When you start lion for the first time it will offer to transfer your data. Point it at your USB external drive and it will move all your data across to your new disk.

Done.

mrplow said:

By recovery HD do you mean the recovery partition created by Lion?

Click to expand...

Yes I mean the recovery partition.
I have a backup disk that I keep a time machine backup of my laptop on
Creating the install disk looks easy. Thanks for the help

If you have a time machine backup you can use that in place of the old disk in an enclosure.

Although an enclosure does mean you can format the old disk and use it for storage etc once the transfers done

Here's another thought on how to approach things and it does not require re-downloading Lion or creating an installer. I would create a "clone" of the current drive. Do not use SuperDuper. It's a great program but does not clone the recovery partition. To do this you need drive enclosure that one of the drives can be placed into while the clone is being performed. I am using something like this so I can swap multiple drives as needed butt there are cheaper alternatives.

Once the new drive is in the enclosure do the following:

1. Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner. It should install even if you are tight on space since it is a small program.

2. Format the new drive as Mac OS extended journaled (this may be done as part of the cloning process but I am not sure).

3. Install the new drive and boot from it. Do not erase the old drive till you are sure the clone is bootable and seems to be working well, The cloning process does not mess up often but it does happen.