Restoring my backup disk to my new one?

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Restoring my backup disk to my new one?

Ok so I need help from any experts on here that can help me with my problem. So recently I bought a bigger hard drive for my Macbook Pro. I made a back up for my old hard drive on an external disk using Time Machine. After it was all backed up I put the new hard drive in and installed my old mac disk that came with my laptop and everything booted up fine. After figuring out how to restore my old hard drive onto my new one it said it put it into a file marked "volumes". Assuming that meant it was working, I waited until it backed it all up on my hard drive. When it did I saw no change to my computer and now I'm totally lost on how to fix it. None of my applications or anything else has changed and I really need help with this.

MacBook Pro (15-inch 2.53 GHz), iOS 7.1

Posted on Apr 7, 2014 1:18 AM

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Answer 1

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BobRz

Level 5

6,138 points

Apr 7, 2014 4:34 AM in response to MacbookProUser92

I'm not sure what you did to try to restore it based on your description. The easy way would be to run Migration Assistant from Applications / Utilities. It's pretty self explanatory. For future reference, the easier way to do this in this type of situation is to just clone the old drive to the new one. This would save you all the reinstallation steps you had to take and give you an exact copy of what you started with. You can still do that if you have the old drive intact. All you need is an enclosure like this and a few instructions.

http://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-2-5-Inch-Aluminum-Enclosure-EC-TB4P/dp/B005EIGUD4/ ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1396870429&sr=8-3&keywords=2.5+enclosure

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Answer 2

Apr 7, 2014 7:47 AM in response to BobRz

Yea sorry my description didn't really help much in trying to figure it out but I did look into migration assistant and it said I couldn't transfer it to this mac because it's running an old mac os, and so I tried to go upgrade on the mac store and everytime my computer says it can't understand the URL address.

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Answer 3

BobRz

Level 5

6,138 points

Apr 7, 2014 8:35 AM in response to MacbookProUser92

Cloning would be much much simpler. Put the new drive in the enclosure, run Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the old drive to the new one, and swap them. You're done.

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Answer 4

Apr 7, 2014 8:49 AM in response to BobRz

Ok so should I put my old drive back into my computer, run carbon copy cloner and set the destination to my new one? Or should I just send it to my external drive, then use that to copy it onto my new hard drive?

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Answer 5

BobRz

Level 5

6,138 points

Apr 7, 2014 9:20 AM in response to BobRz

Put the old one in the external housing. Hold down the Option key at startup and boot from it. Run Carbon Copy Cloner from it to copy from the external to the internal. That's it. Just be careful to not mix up the old drive and the new one when selecting with CCC.

One thing I'd do at this point, just because I'm not sure of the state of the new drive... when you boot from the external, use Disk Utility to reformat it. Sounds like you know the proper method for that already.

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