Upgrading Mac HDD to larger HDD with GUID Partition Table or GPT

[PCX]

Disclaimer: I have not confirmed this, but I think this will only work with 10.5 and higher. I know it does not work with 10.4.9.

First, let me note that if you are simply cloning a mac hard drive to another hard drive of the same size, then this tutorial does not apply to you. This is specifically used for customers who want to upgrade their hard drive to a larger one, but keep all of their programs and files perfectly intact. In my case, I cloned a 160gb hard drive to a 500gb hard drive.


When originally researching this, I found a lot of confusing tutorials that either did not work or were too dangerous, meaning that the data had a higher chance of being destroyed. So I am going to tell you both the simplest and safest way of doing this. Keep in mind that I am doing this off the top of my head since I did not get a chance to do this a week ago when I originally intended too, but the process is fairly simply once you know it.


First you will need to clone the hard drive just like you normally would. Once done, you would normally make another partition for additional storage or resize the main OS partition (more professional) to take up the additional space. However, you will find that you will not be able to do this because the GPT or GUID Partition Table is only set to use the original space available on the original hard drive. We will have to fix this using Parted in the terminal in Linux.

Before we do this though, we need to disable journaling using the mac Disk Utility in command line. There is a way to enable it using the actual Disk Utility GUI once we are done with the process, but you will need to open up the terminal and input this to disable it.

diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/TheVolumeName

Obviously, replace "TheVolumeName" with the volume name.

Now, shutdown the Mac and insert the hard drive into your linux machine. Optionally, you can do all this using your Mac with a live Linux CD like Ubuntu or Parted Magic. Once you boot into linux, open up terminal once again and input this command,

parted /dev/sdx

Obviously, replace x with the appropriate letter. Once you hit enter, you should receive a message saying that the GPT is not using the full hard drive and it will ask you if you would like to fix it. Enter y or yes and now the GPT will be able to use the full drive. It's not a bad idea to run the parted command again and make sure that you do not get the error message. If you do, repeat the process.

Finally, to resize the main OS partition. You will now want to boot the hard drive back up into OSX and open up Disk Utilities. Once there click on the "Partitions" tab and select your hard drive. You will the see your Machintosh HD partition as well as some available space. At the corner of the Machintosh HD partition, there will be a corner that you can click on to expand the partition to the full amount of available space.




Click apply and wait . . . Once it completes, you can now enable journaling buy clicking on the button at the top of the Window.




Once you are done, you will have the option to verify the disk. If you get an error, click on repair disk and you should be good to go.


If I end up doing this again, I will try and be a little more detailed and maybe include some more images, but honestly, you should be able to figure this out if you have some basic knowledge of Linux and Mac.

[iisjman07]

Very nice tutorial [filler]

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Originally Posted by PCX

Disclaimer: I have not confirmed this, but I think this will only work with 10.5 and higher. I know it does not work with 10.4.9.

First, let me note that if you are simply cloning a mac hard drive to another hard drive of the same size, then this tutorial does not apply to you. This is specifically used for customers who want to upgrade their hard drive to a larger one, but keep all of their programs and files perfectly intact. In my case, I cloned a 160gb hard drive to a 500gb hard drive.


When originally researching this, I found a lot of confusing tutorials that either did not work or were too dangerous, meaning that the data had a higher chance of being destroyed. So I am going to tell you both the simplest and safest way of doing this.

To be honest, this is completely unnecessary. I've upgraded larger hard drives in Macs nearly daily for years (way before GUID and 10.4.9, using APM) and have never had a problem having to adjust partition sizes. Its just especially easier since 10.5 since live partitioning is supported. But who cares about live partitioning ability since you are literally restoring one volume to another larger and already empty drive.

First thing you do is go to disk utility, select the drive then select on the far right the restore tab.



Then drag and drop the source volume (volume you are copying from) to the source box. You will see a green plus box letting you know it's okay to drop it.

Then select the destination volume (volume you are replacing) with the volume you wish to write to. Underneath that there is an erase destination box which I suggest you leave checked. This basically means the destination will be erased as the step prior to the destination drive being written over. this will also bring along any naming conventions from the source drive.



Select the restore button at the bottom and that is that. As long as everything is in good working order on source drive and the destination drive is properly partitioned/reformatted this will work just fine. Even with OSs before 10.4.9.

[PCX]

Great info, I will try that out. I probably should have specified that my tutorial was more or less for failing hard drives that were getting upgraded. Thats pretty much 99% of the reason why we upgrade the hard drives in the first place.

That said, we could probably clone the hard drive on to a spare one, then do the same technique as you described above.

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Originally Posted by PCX

That said, we could probably clone the hard drive on to a spare one, then do the same technique as you described above.

Yeah, it works with clones and even if you want to just create a disk image (.dmg) file of the source drive, there is the image button right next to the source box for selecting images. But, yeah results will very with a failing drive. But if you are working from a clone or disk image, there won't be any problems.

[PCX]

Originally Posted by anonymous Mac Tech

Yeah, it works with clones and even if you want to just create a disk image (.dmg) file of the source drive, there is the image button right next to the source box for selecting images. But, yeah results will very with a failing drive. But if you are working from a clone or disk image, there won't be any problems.

Thanks for the info . . . Though I kinda wish you would have posted this to my other post as a solution to my problem.

[anonymous Mac Tech]

Originally Posted by PCX

Thanks for the info . . . Though I kinda wish you would have posted this to my other post as a solution to my problem.

If the drive is not showing the correct size in disk utility (like the issue in that particular thread), I'm not sure it will help. But upload an image of what disk utility is showing and I'll see if I can help.

[PCX]

Just wanted to update this thread now that I had a particular situation happen a few times. Following the process described by AMT, most upgrades have been successful. However, about 3 of those times were not. In those instances, I would either get the big fat no sign or the folder instead of it booting into the OS. In those instances, I had to fall back on my original tutorial, which worked flawlessly on the newer OS version. Just thought I would throw that out there if others were having the same issue.

[300DDR]

I'm confused, why aren't you formatting the new drive in Disk Utility (500gb partition) and using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to "clone" the data over?

Note: if the drive is failing and may have bad sectors, your first step should be something less "risky."

I've also had drives not "expand" in DU, even though they should since they are GUID. In these cases, iPartition is your friend, check it out. It can expand any partition, similar to Partition Magic(?) on the PC.

We use a Yec Ninja to clone "perfectly working" GUID formatted mac drives (faster than just about anything else) then iPartition to expand the partition. For APM, SD or CCC is faster then the time it takes to expand the partition using iPartition (or anything else), unless there is very little data.

Hope this help next time.