Upgrading Boot drive safely ?

[chrisS]

I want to upgrade my internal/boot drive in my MacPro. All the drive bays are full, but I could temporary remove a drive and put in the new one during the "upgrade" process. I have plenty of room on external drive to move stuff. I don't want to lose any prefs/application support/etc. on my boot drive. Ideally when I'm done, I won't notice any difference except the volume is bigger.

Can I just copy the boot drive into a new folder on an external drive, format the new drive, copy everything back, change the startup volume, shutdown, remove old internal, and boot back up ?

Will I need to use software like Super Duper ?

It's very important that I not lose my current setup which took a long time to finally get things "just right".

 

[WPB2]

I want to upgrade my internal/boot drive in my MacPro. All the drive bays are full, but I could temporary remove a drive and put in the new one during the "upgrade" process. I have plenty of room on external drive to move stuff. I don't want to lose any prefs/application support/etc. on my boot drive. Ideally when I'm done, I won't notice any difference except the volume is bigger.

Can I just copy the boot drive into a new folder on an external drive, format the new drive, copy everything back, change the startup volume, shutdown, remove old internal, and boot back up ?

Will I need to use software like Super Duper ?

It's very important that I not lose my current setup which took a long time to finally get things "just right".

Yes SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, for sure. You could also use Time Machine as well. I am not exactly sure about the procedure, but you would have to reinstall the Operating system on the new drive, then migrate the data over with migration assistant from Time Machine.

 

[chrisS]

If I clone the boot drive, why do I need to reinstall OS X ? Wouldn't I be overwriting it anyways ?

 

[WPB2]

If I clone the boot drive, why do I need to reinstall OS X ? Wouldn't I be overwriting it anyways ?

Reinstalling the OS is only if you use Time Machine to restore your old data back to the new HDD. If you use Cloner, then all you have to do is pop in the new HDD, then voila.

 

[chrisS]

Thanks.