I have a MacBook Pro HDD that is maxed out and will not boot. So I've bought a larger HDD to clone to.
I can't use SuperDuper because I can't get in to the OS. The MacBook Pro is my only Apple computer. I do have a Windows 7 PC and a Linux box though.
Can I use either of those to clone the Apple HDD properly? (I already tried using Symantec Ghost on from Hiren's and that was a miserable failure)
Thank you for your help 😀
MacBook Pro
have you tried single user mode to boot? (cmd-s at startup). will that boot ?
I'll give it a shot.
Just an FYI, I am new to the Mac world. I've always been a PC gamer guy and a Linux server nerd.
So far i'm loving my Apple and I want to learn a smuch as I can about them... and BSD too
I'll let you know how your reccomendation worked shortly.
Have you tried booting in target disk mode (holding down the "T" key while booting)? If that succeeds, a firewire symbol will appear and bounce around your screen, and you can then use a firewire cable to another computer to access your data, treating your macbook pro as if it were an external firewire drive. If you can borrow another mac, you could use super duper or carbon copy cloner running on the other machine to clone the drive. I wouldn't assume the system part of your drive is still usable, though, without running Disk Utility to check it.
No, yo can't clone a Mac drive with Windows or Linux. The filesystem format is totally alien to them, hence the failure. I'm supposing you have the shiny new drive in an external enclosure for cloning purposes.
If you're using Lion, get into Lion Recovery Mode (press Command-R prior to the startup chime) and use Disk Utility. Since the new disk will probably come preformatted for Windows systems, use DU to first remove the NTFS partition, repartition in GUID partition scheme (see Options...) and MacOS X Extended format. Next, in the Restore tab choose the internal drive's Macintosh HD volume as Source and your new drive as Destination. Let'er rip, go get a cuppa Joe, will take awhile. After it finishes, test it out by booting: press Option prior to the chime and pick the new boot volume from the list. Once satisfied, swap drives and be done.
I was able to boot in regular mode after a long wait. I opened the Disk Utility and it says the SMART Failed. So now I'm assuming cloning this drive isn't my solution as the HDD probably has bad sectors... right?
Not necessarily. SMART just detected that the drive is bad but not dead (you did boot from it). Does mean the thing has to be replaced immediately. Try to do a Verify Disk to see if it is damaged or not. Then clone the thing immediately to rescue whatever is rescuable. Follow the steps I detailed above, starting with repartitioning the new drive.
Ok. I'm going to try your excellent advice now. It's going to take some time.
I'll let you guys know how it goes. Thank for all your help!!
I suggest you clone from recovery mode and not from regular mode. To enter recovery mode keep the cmd + R keys pressed down during bootup. Also see this article for more details .... http://nyacomputing.com/how-to-transfer-data-to-iphone-5-from-your-old-iphone/
How do I clone my Hard Drive?
