Sunday, April 19, 2009

Cloning Mac HDD

Tools required
1) SuperDuper!
2) Winclone
3) New HDD
4) NTFS-3G_1.2310-stable-catacombae.dmg

Note:
Mac OS X can boot from external HDD. Hence, after cloning the Mac OS X partition to an external HDD, you can verify that the HDD is good to go by booting from it before swapping the external HDD with the internal HDD.

Partition the new HDD. My recommendation is 3 partitions. First partition for Mac OS X, second partition for Windows(Bootcamp). I would recommend a small partition for this as you can always mount this partition to in vmware. And lastly, the final partition as a NTFS partition. The last partition is used to store data to be exchanged between Mac OS X and Windows. This is because Mac OS X cant read from the Windows(Bootcamp) partition when mounted in vmware. As such, the final partition would act as an intermediate partition to exchange data between the 2 OSes.

Install the NTFS plugin to enable Mac OS X to write onto the final partition.
*Recommended to change the existing bootcamp partition into NTFS to enable Winclone to copy the bootcamp partition and clone it to a larger partition. If left as FAT32, the new Windows bootcamp partition is limited to the same storage capacity as the original bootcamp partition.

1) Use SuperDuper to clone the existing Mac OS X partition to the new partition. This might take a while. FYI, 60Gb partition cloning took 1 hour ++.

2) Use Winclone to create an image of the windows bootcamp partition. Restore this image to the new partition. You can delete the image after restoration.

3) Reboot to test out the cloned partitions and swap the HDDs.