Bit of help please Mac Pro disk replacement

[dubaimac]

Hi there,

I just received 2 3tb 7200rpm Hitachi drives, I want to swap them for two 2tb drives in my mac pro, one has my home folder in it, after I moved it from my SSD. I have CCC at the ready, can anyone give me a step by step guide to avoid any problems, I want to clone the contents of each, power down, swap the drives to relevant bays and (hopefully) boot up to exactly the same but with some extra space. All help most appreciated.

 

[flatfoot]

OSX does not use the bay numbers to identify drives! For instance, you could swap your current drives around willy-nilly and your Mac would still boot the same.

I'd do the following:
1) put your new drive into an empty drive bay
2) create a temporary admin account
3) log out of your normal account
4) log into the newly created account
5) from there, clone your old user drive to the new drive (using Disk Utility, Super Duper or CCC)
6) then, in the Accounts preferences pane, point your normal account to the new drive (just as you did when you moved it off of the SSD)
7) restart the Mac
8) make sure your user's folder icon on the new drive is the "house" icon.
9) if you're sure everything has been cloned correctly, you can erase the old drive and/or move the new drive to the old drive's bay and/or delete the temporary admin account

Note: No responsibility is taken for the correctness of this information.

EDIT: The second drive you want to replace can be cloned before or after this process as long as it doesn't contain another user folder. If it's a TimeMachine drive cloning might not work, thus making it necessary to perform a new, complete TimeMachine Backup.

 

[dubaimac]

Thank you very much, just completed this now, all running smoothly and lots more space.

 

[flatfoot]

Great! I'm glad I could help.