OK I'm stuck and cant seem to find the answer I have a Samsung 850 EVO 250g SSD and want to clone it with my new 1tb HDSSD,but every time I try I get an error mesage saying in cant I have read a lot on the web but nothing that seems to pertain to my issue it's all older info I'm finding it seems when you add a ssd apple will automatically set it up as APFS. I just want to move my stuff to the bigger driver that's all
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trying to clone my ssd to a new hdssd
- Thread starter funintehmud
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You have to provide the details about what have you done. Otherwise, we can't tell what's wrong.
Put the drive in an external drive enclosure and use carbon copy cloner to clone the Macs drive to the new one then take that out of the enclosure and install it inside your computer... The drives don’t physically have to be the same capacities just the partition does and that will happen automatically on the drive when you copy.
Just don’t copy it over as a disk image you want the file structure to be root.
And you want to clone the whole volume not just the Mac partition because you want to get the EFI recovery partition on that other drive too.
Just don’t copy it over as a disk image you want the file structure to be root.
And you want to clone the whole volume not just the Mac partition because you want to get the EFI recovery partition on that other drive too.
Not to overlook the obvious, but you didn't say ...
Did you format your new drive before trying to clone it?
Did you format your new drive before trying to clone it?
Cloning from a larger HDD to a smaller SDD, especially sector-by-sector cloning, has challenges that can block you. For example partition offsets, sector alignment, and size differences. So even if you succeed, you can end up with a non-optimal result.
I'd just install MacOS fresh onto the SSD and then use Migration Assistant. That avoids the issues that cloning has.
I'd just install MacOS fresh onto the SSD and then use Migration Assistant. That avoids the issues that cloning has.
If you are wanting to clone, the info in the above quote is what you want
Format the new drive at the main level and then use Carbon Copy Cloner
You can also do as suggested, format the drive and do a fresh macOS install and use Migration Assistant or even restore from a Time Machine backup
I have found the easiest for me to be using Carbon Copy Cloner
I just finished doing this on my 2011 MacBook Air
I swapped out the SSD for a larger one and put the original in an external enclosure
I booted from the external and used Disk Utility to format the internal SSD
Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the external to the internal
Rebooted from the internal and done
I’m going from smaller ssd 250gb to a larger 1tb hdssd and I haven’t thought about trying that, the only reason i wanted to clone is i have office on my current drive and if I install a new copy I won’t have it unless doing the migration assistant with take care of that
The same principles apply in either direction. Migration assistant does move applications. Here is more info: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204350
By the way, moving from an SSD to an HDD is going to make everything much slower. If you are running out of space I suggest a different strategy altogether, which adds the extra capacity of the HDD but keeps the speed of the SSD:
- Keep your OS and applications on the SSD, move your documents, media, etc., to the HDD.
- Or make a Fusion drive and let OSX do it for you.
Ty you for the reply but everyone keeps missing I'm not going from a SSD to HD i'm going fron a SSD to a HDSSD It's a Hybrid Drive still the size of a 3.5 but the benefits of a SSD.
Oh you're right, I did. I don't even know what a sector-by-sector clone would do in that case. Sounds even worse than SSD to HDD, or HDD to SSD. I would definitely do a fresh install and migration.
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THEORETICALLY the OS could/should migrate over time for best performance, but not sure if that will be the case. Think that only happens with official Fusion setups?
Personal suggestion - have a few backups of your data before migration.
Personal suggestion - have a few backups of your data before migration.
I did the fresh
i did the fresh install and migration and it seems to have worked just fine. I totally forgot about trying the migration assistance lol
So far so good, I'm using my Mac now, Seems a bit slow to start but i'm sure it will get better. The new install onto the new drive and then using Migration Assistance seem to be the best way to do it..
Some of the benefits of a SSD, around 8GB worth. Everything else is HDD speed. You will get faster boot and maybe one or 2 apps but everything else will be slower.
What Mark says is true I have one of these seagate hybrid drives in a 2009 MacBook yes it boots faster but not much else is!
Glad you got this working. One other way you could have done it is by using a clonezilla live cd or a stand alone sata duplicator. That's how I migrated my wife's macbook from 250gb to 1tb. It took only 45m to do the whole thing including physically opening the laptop and swapping the drives. Once the new drive booted, I just resized the partition and was done.