I used Carbon Copy Cloner, now what to do?

[vintres]

Hey guys,

sorry to bug you with such a simple question, but in this case, I really just wanna make sure that I make no mistake.

I have a Macbook running on snow leopard and I wanna upgrade my internal hard drive as it is currently too small. I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner and cloned my entire hard drive to an EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE. Now, I have that new internal hard drive from wester digital. What do I do with it? replace the current internal hard drive with the new harddrive and then how do I get the data from the external hard drive with my cloned data to the fresh western digital? Do I boot first from external hard drive etc? I am not sure what to do now?

Oh and also when I was given the option which hard drive to clone (or which part of the hard drive to clone) there was also the option to clone "Install Disk". I don't need to clone that, right?

Please help.

many thanks!
Vincent

 

[unixperience]

Ok if I understand this correctly you have 3 drives
drive A is in the comp right now (and too small0
drive B is your external (that you copied drive A to)
drive C is the new larger drive you want to install

If thats correct then here goes
1) what you are going to do is open up "system Preferences" and click on the "startup disk" tag from here you can now select Drive B, which should be your external harddrive. Now just for safety turn your comp off and on again, it should run off the external at startup.
NOTE: this is also a good time to make sure your copy boots properly

2)if that works, shutdown your computer again, unplug the battery and ac adapter, then proceed to install the new harddrive into your computer(replace drive A with Drive C) replace battery

3)turn on your computer again (it should still boot from the external drive) now run Carbon Copy Cloner again, this time though, copy from the external drive (Drive B) to the new larger internal (Drive B)

that should get you up and running hope that helped

 

[unixperience]

as for the install disk option, I don't think you need that, I opened my CCC and I don't even see that option actually? Under the Target disk side, just make sure it says back up everything, and that should get you covered. Like I said, follow the directions I gave you and boot off your external, that will make sure you did everything properly

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I did the same upgrade back in June so I'd have more room for recording music projects on my MBP with Logic since I'm using it in a portable fashion with my recording gear, not with my dock setup in my den.

I first backed up the internal 320GB drive to my external 500GB firewire drive. I also made a backup of my Boot Camp Windows install using Winclone and stored that file on the external drive on its secondary partition I was already using as an extra "work" drive.

Next, I took apart the MBP and changed the 320GB 5200 RPM drive to a 500GB 7200 RPM Hitachi. I put the MBP back together and booted from the external Firewire drive (it's a WD Passport, so I had to hold the command key to bring up the boot menu and then unplug/plug it to make it available for boot since its firmware has a problem whereby it's not available to boot before that stage in the boot process so you have to unplug/plug it to make it boot, which sucks but at least it'll still work. It doesn't have that problem if you use the USB2 interface or Firewire 400 interface, just the Firewire 800 one; other drives using other chips probably won't have that issue regardless).

Anyway, after booting off the CCC backup partition, I then formatted the new internal drive and set it to use one large 450GB partition with Disk Utility and a 2nd Fat32 50GB partition. I used Disk Utiilty to restore the 320GB partition to the 500GB one (I think CCC might complain about using different sized drives, but Disk Utility will not). Once restored, I then rebooted using the new internal drive. From there, I copied over all my data from the "work" partition of the external 500GB drive (all the data that wouldn't fit on the 320GB drive and so I will in the next couple of steps re-partition the external drive to get rid of it to match the new internal drive). Next, I used WinClone to restore my Windows Boot Camp partition to the Fat32 partition (which it then changes back to NTFS in the process). Once restored and Windows is verified to be working, I can now repartition the external drive.

For the external drive, I used Disk Utility to repartition it to one big 500GB partition and format. I then used CCC to move the internal drive contents to the new external setup. I do not make a Windows partition since WinClone lets me backup the Boot Camp partition to an OSX file that I can then just store on the backup drive (I could have resized it just for that file, but this way it doesn't fill the extra space until I actually use it in Windows).

At this point my internal and external drives are both 500GB drives and both Windows and OSX are both backed up from OSX. The new Hitachi 7200 RPM drive is MUCH faster than the old 5200 RPM drive. I now get read and writes over 100MB/sec (just as fast if not slightly faster than my full size 3.5" SATA Barracuda 7200 RPM 1.5TB drives on my PowerMac).