Migrating Dual Partition HDD to Solid state drive

Question

My current Configuration is a Macbook Pro 15" early 2008 with a 100gb HDD and I'd like to replace this with a Solid State Drive.

The tricky part is that I have an OS X partition and a Windows 7 parition set up, for BootCamp. Ideally, I'd like to clone the drive over, with the extra space (the SSD will have a greater capacity) allocated to the OS X Partition.

Is it as simple as cloning the old drive to the new drive, or are there complications because of BootCamp?

Thanks.

Answer 1

There aren't complications due to Boot Camp per se, as it's just another partition on your drive. One recommendation could be CloneZilla if you want to try cloning the drive over with the partitions intact. However, I have been wary of this approach and will instead present a more manual but workable method.

Basically you will clone each OS separately. These instructions at the Notebook Review forums have worked for me in the past. In a nutshell:

1. Use Winclone to create an image of your Boot Camp installation onto your OS X partition.

2. Put your new drive in an external enclosure and format it as one HFS+ partition (Mac OS X Extended).

3. Use SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your original OS X partition (including the new Windows partiton image) to your new drive.

4. Switch the drives and boot up into OS X on your new drive.

5. Create a new Boot Camp partition in Disk Utility.

6. Use Winclone to restore your Windows image to that partition. You may need to use your Windows installation disk to repair the bootloader on the Boot Camp partition afterwards.

It turns out that Winclone is discontinued but it still works well. Any Windows drive cloning tool would also work (Acronis, Norton Ghost, etc).