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Wicked1

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Apr 13, 2009
3,283
14
New Jersey
I have heard or read somewhere on this forum that you can use Disk Utility to Duplicate your internal hard drive to another drive, how can you do this.

I have the stock 320GB 5400 RPM drive and I want to put in my 320GB 7200RPM with 16MB Cache, but I would rather not load and reload all the software, so how can I move the data from Stock to the new drive.

I already partitioned using GUID and erased the new 320GB drive in an external enclosure which is where the drive is sitting now connected via USB to my MINI.

Thanks
 
there is this handy little app called Carbon Copy Cloner you can download for free that will do the job.
 
SuperDuper is also another free utility that will also clone your factory drive to your external. It's the only one I've ever used and has always worked for me without any problems. Just be sure that you can boot from your clone first. I've never used CCC but I've heard that's just as good.
 
I use Superduper but have used disk utility on occasion as well. Seems to work well. All you do is click restore in disk utility and select the correct source and target drives.

The only question no has been able to answer for me is this: If disk utility does everything needed for this to work (understanding you need to boot from the restore disk first so there are no open files on the source), why do utilities like Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) and SuperDuper exist? What tasks do they perform that disk utility does not?

Perhaps I shall never know...

Cheers,
 
The only difference between CCC/SD! and DU is that CCC/SD! can create incremental clones of the drive. This saves loads of time when updating your backup with the latest state of your working drive. Other than that, DU "Restore" is the same as a full CCC/SD! clone.
 
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