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Recently I purchased the 500GB harddrive to upgrade my 2010 MBP, when I installed the new harddrive, I did not find my Mac OSX install disk! (I guess I lost it).

Is there a way I can upgrade to new harddrive without actually reinstalling the OS?

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Place the old drive into an external drive enclosure, hold down Option when the MBP boots up to select the external drive to boot from, and once in OSX, use the Disk Utility to copy the old drive to the new drive. You can do this as follows:

  1. Open Disk Utility
  2. Select the external drive
  3. Select the Restore tab
  4. Set the external drive as the Source, and the internal drive as the destination.
  5. Verify by the icons that you're restoring from the external drive to the internal drive. The external has an orange icon, while the internal drive has the bare-bones metal.
  6. Click restore
  7. Get a cup of coffee
  8. Get another cup of coffee while still waiting for it to copy.
  9. Reboot machine when it's done copying, and disconnect external drive.
  10. Enjoy your larger harddrive (and new external drive!)
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Thanks a lot, I wish I could up vote your answer a million times! Is it possible to migrate bootcamp partition this way? At present I'm planning to use winclone. – Prashant Jun 13 '11 at 22:30
You should be able to migrate any partition this way, but that's me speculating that it just does a bit-for-bit copy, and not attempting to "smart-copy" the data. I think the way I described will restore all partitions from the old disk to the new disk, but I haven't tried it personally, so I'm not 100% sure. – Darth Android Jun 13 '11 at 22:36
I'm pretty sure that the restore does not operate bit-for-bit and won't copy over a Windows partition. – Kyle Cronin Jun 14 '11 at 0:14
@Kyle you are correct, it did not copied the windows patrition! – Prashant Jun 14 '11 at 14:19
Interesting to note. I'd continue with your plans to use WinClone, or you could use the built-in dd if you're not afraid of some command-line magic. – Darth Android Jun 14 '11 at 14:22
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