I just purchased a solid-state drive and installed it as a second drive on my Mac leaving the original one terabyte drive how do I install OSX on the solid-state and make the original drive basically an external drive without removing it?
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Mac Mini install OS on new SSD
- Thread starter cwegrecki
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To access OS X Recovery, reboot the computer while holding the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager. Then install OSX on new SSD. During setup assistant recover settings, programs, etc. from original HDD. Go to "startup drive" settings in system pref's and select the SSD as the startup drive. When you are convinced all is good, you can erase or whatever you want to do with the original HDD.
Even easier once booted into the recovery partition open the Disk Utility from the Utilities menu and restore the original hard drive onto the new ssd then chose the ssd as the start up disk when it asks you that when you quit the install/recovery process you were in to reboot.
WARNING: If you try to reboot to the recovery partition, Disk Utility will see the newly-installed SSD as "half of a fusion drive" and try to "repair" it back into a fusion setup with the existing HDD. In the process, it will WIPE OUT all your previous data (on the HDD).
My suggestion is this:
1. Boot from the (old) HDD drive.
2. Launch Disk Utility
3. Initialize and test the new SSD drive
4. Get ahold of CarbonCopyCloner from here:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html
(Note: even though it's "pay for" software, you can download and use it FREE for 30 days)
5. Use CCC to "clone" the contents of the HDD to the new SSD
(Note: if you don't want to clone everything, CCC will let you "pick and choose" -- you should at least clone the system and your personal user accounts and apps)
When done, you should have -TWO- bootable systems -- one on each drive.
I suggest that you KEEP a system on both drives. You never know when you may need to do an "emergency boot" from a source other than your "main drive". It's especially nice to have this ability to do random drive maintenance, etc.
My suggestion is this:
1. Boot from the (old) HDD drive.
2. Launch Disk Utility
3. Initialize and test the new SSD drive
4. Get ahold of CarbonCopyCloner from here:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html
(Note: even though it's "pay for" software, you can download and use it FREE for 30 days)
5. Use CCC to "clone" the contents of the HDD to the new SSD
(Note: if you don't want to clone everything, CCC will let you "pick and choose" -- you should at least clone the system and your personal user accounts and apps)
When done, you should have -TWO- bootable systems -- one on each drive.
I suggest that you KEEP a system on both drives. You never know when you may need to do an "emergency boot" from a source other than your "main drive". It's especially nice to have this ability to do random drive maintenance, etc.