MP 1,1-5,1 Newly Cloned SATA Drive Boots Correctly...Does System Understand Upgraded Drive Capacity?

[MacCandy]

I cloned my MacIntosh HD 250GB SATA drive to a 2TB SATA Drive using an external USB 3.0 hard disk cloning device/adapter. All went well. The cloned drive boots fine. I reset the PRAM.

I notice that in Disk Utility the cloned MacIntosh HD drive displays the 250GB drive capacity in the bottom pane of the Disk Utility, while the source disk in the left pane, clearly says 2TB. About This Mac/Storage displays... 2TB SATA DISK...63.14GB free out of 249.2GB.

Am I understanding this correctly... Does the system understand that there is 2TB thereabout available on the SATA disk, but 250GBs is allocated to the MacIntosh HD partition, and some to the Recovery partition???

 

[jaytv111]

The system sees that there is a 2 TB drive with 1 or more partition that you cloned from that adds up to 250 GB, and then the rest is free space. When you clone a drive, you make an exact copy, including the partition table and filesystem metadata, so it doesn't care that there is more space, it's only spaced out like it was the original drive.
To make use of the larger space, you would have to either create a new partition with the free space, or expand the original partition, which I don't know what it's like for a Macintosh system drive, usually you have to boot to a recovery system then expand the partition then FS.

 

[MacCandy]

Thanks... So it won't take advantage of the free space unless I tell it to somehow...manually?

 

[jaytv111]

Thanks... So it won't take advantage of the free space unless I tell it to somehow...manually?

Yes, as I said. You have to either make a partition with the free space. Or you can expand the partition you have, though this may be a bit more complicated (often on my systems I've had to boot to recovery disk and then modify the partition table then extend the filesystem. Alternatively, you can do a new system install.

 

[MacCandy]

Thanks.