Now booting MM (late) 2014 off External SSD; what should I do with the profile on my HHD?

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Level 1

13 points

Now booting MM (late) 2014 off External SSD; what should I do with the profile on my HHD?

As stated in the title, I copied my entire HDD onto an external SSD that's running off USB 3.0. Things have been working terrifically for months now, so I think I'm ready to wipe the original HDD partition that was made when I initially setup my Mac Mini and reclaim around 300GB of space that's just collecting dust. I'm just a little unsure about the best/ safest way to approach this and could use some guidance.

Should I simply erase the partition using Disk Utility? Will that mess anything up?
Should I leave a copy of MacOS on that partition incase my SSD ever fails?
What will happen to the recovery settings if I wipe the original HDD partition?

Any advice is appreciated!

Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

Posted on Aug 13, 2016 3:31 PM

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Answer 1

den.thed

Level 10

92,332 points

Aug 14, 2016 7:34 AM in response to biggie101

Personally I would backup both the Internal HDD and External SSD to another external drive and set it asside before doing anything.

biggie101 wrote:

Will that mess anything up?

1. Depends on how you initally setup and moved everything over to the SSD...?

1.a. If you formatted and installed a clean OS X onto the SSD, then used set up assistant to migrate everything over.

(then yes, it might be safe to delete the OS X and your data off the Internal HDD)

1.b. If you simply copied everything over to the SSD.

(then no, because the two drives could be sharing and relying on each other like Siamese Twins)

2. Depending on how you answered 1...?

It would make a good backup drive for the SSD.

3. That also depends on how you answered 1...?

If your answer was 1.a... then you should already have a Recovery Partition on the SSD.

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Answer 2

biggie101 Author

Level 1

13 points

Aug 14, 2016 7:48 AM in response to den.thed

Thanks for the reply! I installed a fresh copy of El Capitan on the SSD, and migrated everything else over via Carbon Copier. The two drives shouldn't be sharing anything at this point, so hopefully there won't be any surprises.

I don't have another external disk at my disposal but that's good advice. However, I have Time Machine backing up the SSD into a dedicated partition of the HDD already! Would that suffice?

What would be the most appropriate path to clearing OSX off the HDD? Do you think I should wipe the partition entirely from my SSD, or should I boot off of the HHD to uninstall OSX?

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Answer 3

den.thed

Level 10

92,332 points

Aug 14, 2016 10:01 AM in response to biggie101

Sorry I was out for awhile.

Good.

Problem, Disk Utility can not remove the first partition and add the space back to the second partition. So you will need to completely wipe the drive, format it back to one partition and start over with Time Machine.

Personally for ease of use and data safety... I would get a different external HD for Time Machine backups and use the HDD for keeping an up to date CarbonCopyClone of the SSD.

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