Best Practice for Cloning HDD for new SSD

[insimbi]

Hey Guys,
I've got a new Crucial M4 SSD today. I want to clone my current 250MB HDD and restore it to the new Crucial SSD. I believe Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is a good piece of software to accomplish this.

Can someone tell me the best way to do this effectively? This will be my main drive in my MacBook Pro. Do I clone it to an external HDD (like a WD My Book first)?

Just wondering the best steps to take. Thanks for your help!

 

[heisenberg123]

Hey Guys,
I've got a new Crucial M4 SSD today. I want to clone my current 250MB HDD and restore it to the new Crucial SSD. I believe Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is a good piece of software to accomplish this.

Can someone tell me the best way to do this effectively? This will be my main drive in my MacBook Pro. Do I clone it to an external HDD (like a WD My Book first)?

Just wondering the best steps to take. Thanks for your help!

yes CCC is great for that
if you have an enclosure for the ssd you can clone straight to it if no enclosure than yes clone to the external make sure your external is formatted with a GUID partition table once you've cloned your hhd to the external test you can boot from it, leave it plugged in and restart your mac when you hear the chime hold option you should see your external in the boot choices, if you can boot into osx test opening some apps to see if the clone was a total success. If it is turn off mac swap SSD for HHD again boot off the external and now format the newly inserted SSD as GUID and OS Journaled now with CCC pick the external as the source the SSD as the taget and chose the restore option in CCC once its all complete make sure the SSD is the boot disk and restart

 

[insimbi]

yes CCC is great for that
if you have an enclosure for the ssd you can clone straight to it if no enclosure than yes clone to the external make sure your external is formatted with a GUID partition table once you've cloned your hhd to the external test you can boot from it, leave it plugged in and restart your mac when you hear the chime hold option you should see your external in the boot choices, if you can boot into osx test opening some apps to see if the clone was a total success. If it is turn off mac swap SSD for HHD again boot off the external and now format the newly inserted SSD as GUID and OS Journaled now with CCC pick the external as the source the SSD as the taget and chose the restore option in CCC once its all complete make sure the SSD is the boot disk and restart

Great! Thanks for the instructions! Can I use an external drive that already has stuff on it? Or does the external need to be completely blank already? I don't want to lose the existing files on the external. I just want to put my copied clone there as a file. Does it just create a big file on the external?

 

[heisenberg123]

Great! Thanks for the instructions! Can I use an external drive that already has stuff on it? Or does the external need to be completely blank already? I don't want to lose the existing files on the external. I just want to put my copied clone there as a file. Does it just create a big file on the external?

you could partition the external for your clone, but I'm not sure you can make it GUID which is essential without formatting it, a clone is the same size as the drive/partition your cloning