I've got a 2010 Macbook Pro hard drive that's getting full, with partitioned Mac OS/Windows sections. I know it's possible to clone hard drives to preserve the OS's/settings/programs, but I wasn't sure what the best way to do this was. I'd love something that I could clone and already start with equally sized partitions for the 2 OS's if possible. Thanks for any advice.
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Cloning HDD
- Thread starter centarian07
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Partition using Disk Utility, then clone internal drive to one or both of your partitions using Carbon Copy Cloner.
- Buy bigger drive
- Buy external USB drive caddy
- Fit drive in caddy
- Connect, partition with disk utility as desired
- Clone from each of your internal partitions to the new partitions on the new drive with CCC as above
- Test boot from external drive
- Swap internal drive with new drive
- Boot
For the new drive I'd recommend the Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm....big, fast, low power draw and good warranty.
I don't think Carbon Copy Cloner (IMO the best of its kind and well worth the 40 bucks!) supports Windows partitions, as far as I know you need "Winclone" for that. Maybe someone who has had actual experience with that could chime in on the Windows aspect?
Possibly, don't use windows at all but not sure why CCC wouldn't clone it - can it not read the files or the partition format??
I don't think CCC clones windows partitions, by default OSX does not have the ability to write to NTFS volumes and that's what you would need in order for CCC to use it.
I still use the older free version of CCC so maybe its a newer feature, though I'm still skeptical.
I still use the older free version of CCC so maybe its a newer feature, though I'm still skeptical.
I always keep a CD/USB of Clonezilla in the house for stuff like this. If you have it on a USB and no CD drive you can choose to dump Clonezilla in to RAM, I do this anyways as it seems to be much faster plus allows me to use both usb ports if needed.