The Macbook I bought back in May of 2007 has been getting a bit long in the tooth. Shortly after I bought it, I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB, so the memory and the processor have been holding up just fine for me, as I mainly program and use VMWare (not much gaming). But, after a while, the 70 GB hard drive starts to feel a bit cramped, as the Macbook is my main machine. I’ve mitigated the problem by buying various external drives, but nothing can replace a nicely sized internal disk.
So it was time for a disk upgrade. It turns out that upgrading the disk with command line tools (as was my original intention) like asr, rsync, or ditto copies the files intact, but won’t make the disk bootable unless the root file system is mounted read-only. I can get my Mac into single-user mode, but, coming from Linux, I’m not sure how to remount the root filesystem read-only on the BSD-based OS X. Plus, I can’t use my screen capture utility in single-user mode.
So, I ended up researching other tools, like CCC and SuperDuper! SuperDuper! seemed to fit the bill, so that is what I made the video with, but I’d be very interested to see what people’s experiences have been with CCC and/or command line tools making bootable clones for use in an upgrade. Anyway, the video is now posted on YouTube:
Macbook Hard Disk Clone & Upgrade