Q: How do I migrate Mavericks from my original HD to my 2nd HD?

You can either download and install Mavericks again, or "clone" the existing installation. Carbon Copy Cloner or similar utilities can be used for that.

Carbon Copy Cloner

Disk Utility will also clone HD's.

Sadly Apple don't seem to have pretty instructions for doing it, but it is very simple.

Just boot to recovery where these instructions say use the CD/DVD installer disk.

http://www.macinstruct.com/node/147

SuperDuper! is another option.

I cannot boot from my original boot drive due to my stupid error of installing a developer's preview of 10.9 without a backup that I can access (for some mysterious and unnamed reason JustCloud cancelled my unlimited size with versioning for my three 1 TB drives). I am installing a fourth drive to take over as the boot drive using The Snow Leopard installation disk from Apple Support. I am planning to upgrade that drives OS to the most current release version of 10.9.x using the App Store. As for moving my data and apps from the old, unbootable developer's release drive to the newly installed 10.9 boot drive can/should I use Migration Assistant or another means of getting my precious data and apps? Is there a better way? I have read and read discussions with people with similar problems but none say that explicitly that I can use Migration Assistant to migrate to a clean install on the same machine. I just don't want to dig deeper into the hole I've gotten myself in. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance.

Or boot into Recovery and use Disk Utility from there.

joe3rd wrote:

 

I cannot boot from my original boot drive due to my stupid error of installing a developer's preview of 10.9 without a backup that I can access (for some mysterious and unnamed reason JustCloud cancelled my unlimited size with versioning for my three 1 TB drives). I am installing a fourth drive to take over as the boot drive using The Snow Leopard installation disk from Apple Support. I am planning to upgrade that drives OS to the most current release version of 10.9.x using the App Store.

Any reason for not just booting to a USB installer or into recovery mode as VikingOSX suggested?

Going 10.6 to 10.9 seems a little convoluted. Erase the new disk & let 10.9 create it's own recovery partition.

Making USB installers…

http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/08/make-a-bootable-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-installer-from -a-usb-flash-drive/

http://liondiskmaker.com/

As for moving my data and apps from the old, unbootable developer's release drive to the newly installed 10.9 boot drive can/should I use Migration Assistant or another means of getting my precious data and apps? Is there a better way? I have read and read discussions with people with similar problems but none say that explicitly that I can use Migration Assistant to migrate to a clean install on the same machine. I just don't want to dig deeper into the hole I've gotten myself in. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance.

Migration Assistant will move from one install to another, it doesn't need to be competed during the install, the app lives in the Utilities folder.

Personally I like to ensure the Mac is setup with a new admin user (that isn't the same as any username in the backup), then use Migration Assistant to move the other accounts.

If you have a ton of old apps consider just copying over the user folder into /Users and then create a user with the same 'shortname' it will then prompt you to re-use that users folder & it automatically corrects all the permissions.

10.9 doesn't seem to like old kernel extensions, startup items & many old launchd jobs. So if possible start clean & avoid adding anything that isn't current or 10.9 supported.

Many of the "Mavericks is soo slooow" threads are because of old apps running as login items & at boot etc.

Drew, thank you very much for responding.

"Any reason for not just booting to a USB installer or into recovery mode as VikingOSX suggested?

Going 10.6 to 10.9 seems a little convoluted. Erase the new disk & let 10.9 create it's own recovery partition."

I have no USB drive and the recovery partition is a 10.8 that for some reason, probably because the 10.9 dev release did not install fully or correctly, will not connect to the internet. I even tried the command line version of the old menu "System Update" to the same result. I also removed all non-Apple kernel extensions, one at a time, as the second attempt at recovery after I first re-verified the drive and attempted to reinstall the developer version as some people were able to escape the cycling from Finder back to login (after seemingly random interval Finder loading times all less than 10 seconds with the Finder loading) that was the original symptom. I also think the OS could use a clean install since all have been upgrades since 2009.

You can use any disk with a GUID partition table to make a 'bootable installer partition' it doesn't need to be USB.

For example, you can add a ~12GB partition to any of those disks 4 disks(?) you mentioned. Copy the 10.9 installer onto it. The installer is about 6 GB, but the free space helps.

I'm making the assumption you have a working OS somewhere (ignore me if that isn't the case). You can even install 10.6.8 use that to make the installer on another disk & then erase the 10.6 volume to install 10.9.

There are a lot of ways to do it, the important part is to avoid copying too much back via Migration Assistant, since older apps don't play well on 10.9.

Good luck