Chosen Solution
Hi, First of all, sorry for my English but I’m not native! Background: I just reached the capacity limit of my 250 GB HD intially bought with my MPB 15" (late 2008). The current HD is partitioned with 210GB for the Mac OS X Lion, and 40GB for Bootcamp with Windows 7. My plan is to change the HD with a Crucial M4 512GB SDD and eventually allocate 450GB to OS X Lion, and 112GB to Bootcamp. Of note, I do have a time machine back-up but I guess it only concern the files under OS X Lion. I will need your view on the following: 1- In order not to reinstall everything, the quickiest way would be to clone the HD on the SDD, i.e. follow method #2 (from step 19). a) How 250GB of data will be cloned on a 512GB volume space? b) Is there as step during the cloning where we can decide to change the partition volume? c) in summary, can I use cloning to reach my goal? 2- If the cloning does not allow me to reach my goal, I guess I will have to do a Fresh re-installation following your method #1? 3 - Finally, could you please confirm that I can replace the HD with the SDD using the following instruction guide. Thanks a lot for your help and guides ! Cheers, Emmanuel
On the Mac side you can clone using Carbon Copy Cloner, it will produce a bootable clone and it won’t mind the size difference, but you can also use the restore function of Mac’s disk utility to restore from your old HD/SSD to your new, both options of course presume that you are able to mount both disks somehow (externally or internally)
On the cloning I use a program called True Image http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/pro… I use it for customers that have a hard drive going bad and it has the factory restore on the same hard drive. It images the entire drive all partitions. You could use it from your bootcamp side because I do not know if it works on OSX. I know you can use it to resize the partitions as well. However if it was me I would just do a fresh install of everything to have a nice fresh start with a SSD. Side note make make sure you turn off the auto defrag in Windows 7. It will burn up the SSD.
I would like to suggest you to use Stellar Drive Clone to keep backup up of your Mac drive. This tool is very reliable and useful to create clone of Mac volume. I am using for my Mac and it works superb.
sapiojo …. There is a discussion here: How do I transfer dual partitions to a new hard drive? I know CarbonCopyCloner to be excellent (on the Mac side) but don’t know anything about bootcamp/Windows…. You can download a trial of CCC (which might be all you need) … and versions UP TO about Jan 2013 were ‘donation-ware’ (with very UN-obtrusive adverts) you might still be able to get an old copy somewhere. New versions are ’trial-ware’ (licence around 25 UK pounds/30 euros/40 dollars).
From what I found there is not a single solution for doing this. It’s either all Windows or all OSx clone. Ithink the drive has to be pre-partitioned then clone a bootable version of OSx. After that run Bootcamp as if it’s a new install then clone your previous Bootcamp to the location. I’m working through this now.
