Changing the drive I boot from...

Anyone out there know how I go about switching the internal drive I boot from? I'm installing a new internal drive, cloning my old drive over, and will be using the new drive from now on while keeping stuff I'm not afraid of losing on the old one.

Cloning seems a lot simpler than reinstalling all my software onto a blank one.

My new drive has more capacity than my original and I've been reading advice that suggests cloning a smaller drive onto a larger one leaves the remaining extra gigabytes unusable. Is this true?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

Cloning your drive to a new, larger drive will not render the extra space unusable. If you do it right, you'll have a drive that's exactly like the one you have now; but with extra space.

viddiewell said:

My new drive has more capacity than my original and I've been reading advice that suggests cloning a smaller drive onto a larger one leaves the remaining extra gigabytes unusable. Is this true?

Click to expand...

No, it's not.

The answer to your question is go into System Preferences --> Startup Disk, then select which drive you want to use as your startup disk.

Recommendation:
1. Buy an external enclosure for your old harddrive.
2. Place your NEW drive inside the enclosure and clone your old drive to the new drive. I highly recommend Super Duper!
3. With the new drive still in the enclosure, reboot from the NEW drive to ensure everything is working properly.
4. Choose your new Startup Disk. Then Shut Down.
5. Take NEW drive out of enclosure and replace in your computer.
6. Boot up. You may have to reselect your startup disk.
7. If everything is working fine, format your old drive and use as additional storage.