HOWTO - Clone your Mac OS X hard drive

May 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 · Filed Under Call Me a Geek, Computing, HOWTO, Mac OS X 

First of all, why do I need to clone the hard drive? Good question though. Here are a few possible answers:

  1. I have too much money to spend for a spare hard drive to clone my Mac hard drive.
  2. I want to have a bootable external hard drive, installing on an external USB hard drive is not possible.
  3. I want to upgrade my Mac’s hard drive, and I don’t want to do the installations and setup all over again

Obviously number 3 is my answer. I acquired a bigger capacity hard drive to upgrade my current 120GB hard drive in my MacBook. After some Googling around, I found an answer.

There is an Apple utility program called Apple restore or asr located in /usr/sbin. Connect your external USB hard drive and format it using Disk Utility. Open the Terminal in Applications -> Utilities. Type the following command line into the Terminal to copy your hard drive over your external drive.

% sudo asr -source /Volumes/OSX BOOT VOLUME NAME/ -target /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/

Replace “OSX BOOT VOLUME NAME” and “TARGET VOLUME NAME” with actual volume names. asr will take quite some time to copy the contents of hard drive to external hard drive. Get a cuppa, pop in your iPod earphone and relax.

When asr completes the execution, it will print a message:

asr: did not copy blessed information to target, which may have missing or out-of-date blessed folder information.

Then, bless your target drive with this:

% sudo bless -folder /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/System/Library/CoreServices

Now, the hard drive is bootable. Restart your Mac and hold down “option” key. A screen will appear allowing to choose which volume to boot from.

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Comments

6 Responses to “HOWTO - Clone your Mac OS X hard drive”

  1. Jonathan Collins on May 25th, 2008 18:55

    Adrian, thanks for tips. I am a brand new Mac user (couple of days old) and your blog has provided a lot of useful information about using a Mac.

    Jon C.

  2. dragon on June 27th, 2008 16:54

    Thanks bro, you saved my day. I don’t have to search the web for how to clone my hard disk.

    I bought a new 250GB drive to upgrade my new MacBook. Yes, I upgraded to a new MacBook 2.4GHz. I wanted to clone my “old” hard disk so that I could install Tiger on the old hard disk and had Leopard on my new hard disk. I wanted to be able to boot from my old hard disk (Tiger) from USB. And this has saved me a lot of time. This method also lets me test the newly cloned hard disk before I swapped the hard drive.

    龙

  3. Ranjit on June 29th, 2008 9:17

    Hi,

    Thanks for the tips. Nice blog too.

  4. Tokyo Mac on July 5th, 2008 9:19

    Very useful, thankyou. As fyi to others, my source and target volumes have spaces in the name, which I have to “escape” with the backslash. I.e.,

    % sudo asr --source /Volumes/OSX\ BOOT\ VOLUME\ NAME/ --target /Volumes/TARGET\ VOLUME\ NAME/

    ( MacOS 10.5.4, Power PC )

  5. Tokyo Mac on July 5th, 2008 9:21

    sorry, I am in Japan .. the keyboard “backslash” appears as a yen symbol online - please edit this comment !

  6. Adrian Hoe on July 5th, 2008 12:27

    Thank you Tokyo Mac.

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