My MacBook Pro’s HDD seems to be on the way out—this is happening and disk utility said I should replace my drive so I’ve purchased a replacement. My current disk is 500GB with 287GB used. How can I safely copy all the files from my old one to my new one (also 500GB)?
I thought about using Disk Utility to create an image which would involve these steps:
- Mount the new disk via USB with an enclosure
- Create a disk image of the old drive using disk utility and put it on the new disk
- Boot from CD and open Disk Utility
- Erase the old disk so it is empty
- Move the image of the old disk back on to the—now empty—old disk
- Put the new disk in my laptop and the old disk in my USB enclosure
- Restore the image of the old disk from the old disk on to the new disk
- Boot off the new disk with all my old files now on it
My questions are:
- Does the basic Mac OS, which you boot from DVD, allow you to read from USB drives and browse file systems so I can do points 5 and 7?
- Isn’t it dangerous to have all my files in one image on my old (dying) disk with no other complete copy? I would prefer to directly copy from one to the other.
- Could I use rsync to make a direct as-is copy from one to the other?