How to Clone Mac OS X to a New Hard Drive

Cloning makes a complete bootable copy of your hard drive ontoanother drive.



Here is what you will need:

a Mac with Mac OS X Tiger or Leopard installeda new hard drivea FireWire or USB enclosure for the drive (not necessary if youhave a Power Mac with room for another internal drive)a copy of SuperDuper[Editor's note: You can also use Carbon CopyCloner.]Let's get started.

First, put your new drive hard drive enclosure. Plug it into yourMac, and switch the Mac on. If your enclosure needs to be plugged intoa power source, do this and then switch it on.

Once the Mac is booted, you will need to format the new drive into aMac format in Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder inside theApplications folder). Down the left hand side Disk Utility will showboth drives. Select the one in the enclosure.

You will see five tabs across the middle of the screen: select"Erase". Double check the Volume Format is "Mac OS Extended(Journaled)" and give it a name (or leave it as it is). Then select the"Erase" button. The new drive will erase within a few seconds and yourdrive is now ready for cloning.

Don't worry - you cannot erase your existing hard drive with MacOS X installed on it, as it is the drive you have booted from andis therefore locked.

Download SuperDuper. It is free when used for cloning. Install itand run it.

In the SuperDuper screen, you will see three drop downs.



In the first one, labelled "copy", select the drive in your Mac. Inthe second drop down labelled "to", select the new drive that you justformatted.

The third one should be labelled "using" - select "Backup - allfiles".

New select the "Copy Now" button.

If you are connected via USB 1.1, it will take quite a while (maybean hour or two). If you are connected via FireWire or USB 2.0, then itwill be quicker (maybe 20 minutes - depending on how much is on yourhard drive).

Once completed, shut down the computer and external hard drive.Remove the internal drive and replace it with the new one you justcloned to - and boot the machine.*

If successful, the Mac will work exactly as before. You will notnotice anything different, except a larger drive.

If it hasn't worked, the machine will not boot.

* Editor's note: You may want to test the clone drive beforeperforming the transplant. To boot from the external drive, hold downthe Option key during startup. Your Mac will display icons for anybootable drive. Select the new drive, click on the right arrow icon,and your Mac should boot from it. If not, erase the new drive and tryagain. Once you know it's working, transplant it. (Note that some ofthe oldest G3 Macs can't boot into OS X via USB.)

You can also use this procedure to clone OS X to another Mac - justinstall the cloned drive. As long as it's not too big for that Mac'sdrive controller to recognize (see HowBig a Hard Drive Can I Put in My iMac, eMac, or Power Mac?), youshould be good to go.

We've been doing this at Low End Mac headquarters for years, and itworks very well. The registered version of SuperDuper is also a greatbackup program, which we use regularly.

Carbon Copy Cloner works as well as SuperDuper for cloning, andversion 2.3 will also let you clone Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3.(SuperDuper only supports OS X 10.4 and 10.5.)