Cloning A Mac Hard Drive


A mate of mine who has only been using Macs for a few weeks has a PowerBook G3. We installed Mac OSX Tiger on it and then he bought a larger hard drive. He was about to reinstall Mac OSX Tiger when I suggested cloning.

Cloning makes a complete bootable copy of your hard drive onto another drive without the need to reinstall or set up the OS, applications and user files again. Being a PC user he was new to the idea so I emailed him over some instructions and it worked no problem. So for anyone new to cloning, here is how to do it.

Here is what you will need:

A Mac with Mac OSX Tiger or Leopard already installed, a new hard drive, a firewire or USB enclosure and a copy of SuperDuper. So let's get started.

Firstly put your new drive hard drive enclosure. Plug it into your Mac and switch the Mac on. If you enclosure needs to be plugged into a power source, do this and switch it on.

Once the Mac is booted you will need to format the drive into a Mac format in Disk Utility. To do so, choose the 'Go' menu and select 'Utilities'. Then find 'Disk Utility' and run it.

Down the left hand side will be both drives. Select the one in the enclosure.

You will then 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.

Don't worry you cannot erase your existing hard drive with Mac OSX installed on it as it is the drive you have booted from and this is therefore locked.

The new drive will erase within a few seconds and your drive is now ready for cloning.

Download SuperDuper from Shirt-Pocket.com. It is a free. Install it and then run it.

In the SuperDuper screen, you will see three drop downs. The first one is labelled 'copy' so select the drive in the machine that you want to clone from. The second drop down is labelled 'to' so select the new drive that you have just formatted. The third one should be labelled 'using' and select backup all files.

Now you are ready to clone. Select the 'Copy Now' button.

If you are connected via USB it will take a while (about an hour or two), if Firewire or USB 2 then it will be quicker (about 20 minutes) - depending on how much is on your hard drive.

Once completed, shut the machine down. Take out the internal drive and put in the new one you just cloned on to and boot the machine.

If successful the Mac will work exactly as before and you will not notice anything different, except a larger drive. If it hasn't worked then the machine will not boot.
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This article/page was written/updated by Simon Royal in 2008. If you would like to add your comments, disagree with my views or believe it is stolen, or find it offensive then please email me.