Macbook HDD upgrade plan and questions - external drive?

[djbrickhouse]

Hi all,

Time to upgrade my macbook HDD. I have a plan and some questions. Here it is:

1. Purchase 250 GB or 320 GB external 2.5" SATA firewire 400 or USB drive with case.

2. Attach excternal drive

3. Use SuperDuper to dupe my external drive as a bootable drive.

4. Take out internal drive, and put in place the drive from the external case

5. Boot machine and verify all is ok

6. Insert old internal into external case, erase it and use as a backup drive.

Anyone done this?

Thoughts?

 

[Neil321]

Yep your plan is Ok but their a couple of points, 1) don't forget to format the new drive before cloning over OS X and 2) you should boot from the external ( new drive ) before doing the swap otherwise if cloning over didn't work or the drive was dead on arrival ( DOA ) you just waisted your time

 

[djbrickhouse]

great, thanks,

I'll do that...

is there a format of the drive that is preferable? I know there are a few different formats, which should I use?

 

[kalex]

Use macOS journaled which is default MacOS format

 

[Bakkalohriat]

Don't forget to ensure that the drive is using the GUID partition table; you can change that in the Partition tab in Disk Utility.