Best way to clone HDD?

hey guys. I have 2 HDDs in my MBP and my storage drive appears to be failing. as such, I've ordered a replacement HDD that's a little bigger (640gb vs 500gb). the drive to be replaced has 3 partitions on it. it is not the OS drive.

what would be the best software to use to clone this drive and drop the image onto the new one with minimal effort?

thanks, guys.

 

Someone posted this on the Mac OS X Software thread: SuperDuper

I haven't had a chance to test it yet.

 

YOu can just use the OS included disk utility. It does everything, no need to download or buy any other utilities. With it I made images of OSX installations with all apps and updates and "resealed" for that out-of-box-experience when restored to a new drive. And I cloned the entire OS to an external USB drive, bootable via USB. Very handy for doing other "stuff", like stuff that requires older versions of iTunes with iOS devices. Very easy to do.

 

Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner. I use the former, cloned MB update drives x6 now without incident.

Both are easier and require less tech savvy to accomplish clones than DiscUtil.

Both have consistently been highly rated by mainstream media as well as NBR denizens.

 

+1 for superduper. Its easy and free.

 

great. thanks, guys!

 

just an update: CCC and SuperDuper were no-go's, as they can't clone NTFS drives (some of my partitions are NTFS).

The disk utility image suggestion is in progress and is about 60% complete. I'll update when I try to drop said image onto the new drive. I hope the change in available space (500gb -->640gb) won't have unintended consequences. especially with regard to how I would like to see the partition get the extra space.

hmmm. I pretty sure this won't be as easy as I'd like to think it would be.

if this approach doesn't work, my next plan will probably be to put the drives in external HDDs, hook them up to my windows computer and try to clone with ShadowProtect. I just don't know if that will play well with journaled drives. I guess we'll see.

worst case, I'll just try to rebuild the partitions on the new drive and simply copy and paste everything from one drive to the other.

 

No, you can't directly clone NTFS or Bootcamp partitioned drives via any of the suggested software, and I don't believe Disk Utility works either - would have helped if you'd mentioned that before .

The solutions I've seen for this scenario of fully cloning an OS X / non-OS X partitioned drive essentially revolve around first cloning the OS X partition onto the new (single) partition drive, then set up a bootcamp partition, and then clone back the old BC partition into the newly created one using a Windows-based cloning tool like Acronis (which has a fully functional 14 day trial).

Copy and paste will only work if you're storing data alone on the NTFS (which wouldn't make a lot of sense to me). I had found a detailed solution to the bootcamp clone procedure a year ago or so, see this link @ MacWorld on WinClone.

 

CCC is the best one I've used so far.

A very close 2nd place is Clonezilla (bootable ISO).

 

last update. did it yesterday without any real problems.

technique was as follows:

0.) took careful note of the the order in which OSX identified each partition (ie disk1s2, disk1s3) and partition names and filesystems so that I could accurately replicate this on the new HDD.

1.) put my old 500GB HDD into an external HDD enclosure and installed the new 640GB HDD.

2.) formatted the new HDD in Disk Utility and created the partitions with the same order and file systems for the partitions as were on the original drive. looked it over to make sure everything was listed the exact same way. resized the drives as necessary to account for the extra 140GB upgrade.

3.) used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the 2 HFS+ partitions from the external drive's partitions to the according internal partitions. (2 of the 3 drives were HFS+).

4.) did a "show all files" command in the Console and rebooted Finder so that I could see all the files on my single NTFS partition and simply copied and pasted all the files (including the hidden files) from the external NTFS partition to the internal one.

...and that was it. checked all the files and applications I needed to to ensure OSX was functioning properly, then rebooted into Windows to make sure all apps and drives got the correct drive letters. everything "just worked" this time, which was a big relief.

thanks to all who offered suggestions. it really took a combination of them all.

 

VERY intriguing that this little trick managed to replicate the full Windows file structure etc via copy/paste and keep it functional. Wouldn't have thought that would work, with all the hooks that the Registry has for installed software.

 

Had to be just a data volume. You cannot replicate windows boot partitions w/o winclone which has been discontinued but works most of the time.

Cheers,

 

correct. it was not the drive that Windows was installed on. just come applications and files. that would not have worked on the install drive. the registry would have been lost, among other things (registry being the most critical of all).

 

Interesting, I used CopyCatX when I cloned my OS drive. It worked for the whole drive, OSX and Windows 7 bootcamp partitions. I wonder if it would have worked for you.