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I received an email from a Know It All who wanted me to go more in-depth with the SSD replacement...


G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ
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Allen Bryant That process is pretty easy on the Mac. You can use Disk Utility to just restore your old drive to your SSD (do this before swapping them and you have to be aware that if you have 1TB of data on your HD that it's not going to fit on you 240GB SSD).

 

I think Snow Leopard and above you need to book into restore mode (Option-Shift-R while booting, I think) or just book up in the 'choose the disk' mode (hold down Option while booting) and select the restore partition. Then you go into Disk Utility and select the internal drive and click on the 'Restore' tab and restore it to your SSD drive connected via USB.

 

The other alternative is to have the latest OS X on a usb drive and then just boot off of that and start fresh or you can go boot into Restore mode with the new SSD in and there's just enough information known in your Mac to be able to connect to apple.com and start the install process.

 

It'll ask you to restore from Time Machine (which you should be using to back things up) or you can keep it clean by installing all of the Apps yourself and then pulling your data back from the backup.

 

I've probably made it sound more complicated than it is but that is, in part, because there are several ways to approach the problem.

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Bradley Bishop I started with a fresh install and intended to use my time machine backup to selectively move files and pics onto the new ssd. I managed to screw this up by not naming the new ssd the same as the old one. I also can't seem to be able to selectively move files. Apparently making an exact clone of the old drive is by far the most trouble free but that's not what I wanted.

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Allen Bryant  OK - you can go into Disk Utility and rename your volume, if that's holding you back. I've never done the Time Machine restore bit but, instead, keep my data on a separate drive. I thought Time Machine allowed you to restore wherever you liked and even prompted you. If it's hanging up on the volume name then just rename it and continue.

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Matt Fox Boot into "Recover" mode (hold down Option-Shift-R while you power up). Go to Disk Utility (off the top menu - you're not installing). Select the drive (I'm assuming you're backing up the main drive - thus why I had you boot into Recover Mode), click on New Image and then select the destination (your NAS). You'll have an image of your main drive on your NAS that you'll be able to 2x click on to mount, if you need to grab any files off of it.

 

While you can use other cloning utilities, everything you need is in Disk Utility.

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