Copy OS X drive to another

fuzz_ball

I just got a new (faster) HD and I want to copy my current system drive contents to the new one. I tried initializing and then simply copying everything over, however, once I chose the new HD as the Start up disk (it was recognized) and then rebooted, I would get the chime and the happy mac and then stare at the spinning CD forever. So that obviously didn't work. Anyone out there know a better (painless) way?



Thanks!

ghost_user_name

You probably forgot to copy the hidden folders and files at the root of the drive. Those include (but may not be limited to):



.Trashes

.hidden

.vol

automount

bin

cores

dev

etc

mach

mach.sym

mach_kernel

private

sbin

tmp

usr

var

kate

You need a bit more than that:



The Unix links must point to the correct locations, which your copy does not provide, file permissions may be an issue too, all invisible UNIX files must be copied.



While there are some scripts out there that claim to do a clean backup, I found so far nothing better than using the terminal and the ditto tool to do it. Like all those ideas this has been covered before, so I'll just pass a link for you:

<a href="http://www.bombich.com/mactips/image.html"; target="_blank">http://www.bombich.com/mactips/image.html</a>;



The author meanwhile has put up a script that combines all those mentioned steps, which can be downloaded here:

<a href="http://www.bombich.com/mactips/ccc.html"; target="_blank">http://www.bombich.com/mactips/ccc.html</a>;



I tested the ditto way and everything works well, even booting. I did not test the script yet.