Transfer boot internal hard drive to external SSD?

[Tulipone]

I have an external SSD that I would like to use as a boot drive in place of the internal. Is there a way of cloning the internal directly and changing that to the start up disk? I would rather not loose everything already on the internal and rebuild from there.

Grateful for your advice.

 

[jamietshaw]

Yes – use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to do the clone. Then restart, holding down Alt to display bootable devices and choose the external SSD. Once you log in you can check that you're not using your internal drive because you should be able to eject it.

To make the SSD the default device to boot from, you should be able to go to System Preferences > Startup Disk.

 

[Tulipone]

Yes – use something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to do the clone. Then restart, holding down Alt to display bootable devices and choose the external SSD. Once you log in you can check that you're not using your internal drive because you should be able to eject it.

To make the SSD the default device to boot from, you should be able to go to System Preferences > Startup Disk.

Thank you. A realised that I will also need to change the file structure also as using High Sierra. Hopefully now sorted.