Copy Bootable Main OS X Hard Drive - February 9, 2011
If you want to replace your Mac OS X main hard drive with a larger one, I find this process to work well for me.
1) Connect the new drive to your Mac using an external USB dock.
2) Insert your OS X DVD (Snow Leopard) and use “startup disk” to have your system reboot from the DVD. Or, you can just reboot and hold down the ‘C’ key on your keyboard to make it boot from the DVD.
3) From the installer program, go to utilities and launch disk utility.
4) Erase the new drive and create a partition (Mac OS Extended Journaled). I’ve had problems using the entire disk in the past. I recommend you size the partition to be slightly smaller than the entire disk. A few hundred MB is probably enough. You can drag-and-resize the partition right in disk utility.
5) Using the restore function, drag the original hard drive to the source box and drag your new disk partition to the destination box. I unchecked the option to erase the drive again and let it just copy over all the files from the original drive. Once you start, it will probably take a few hours.
6) Quit disk utility, shut down and physically swap out the hard drives and boot up from the new one.
Slight variations from this process in the past have resulted in problems such as startup disk not being able to bless the new disk and make it bootable which is very frustrating of course.