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Currently I have a 1TB drive with the following arrangement

  • 500GB NTFS (with my data on it)
  • 500GB HFS+ (empty)

I would like to change this to:

  • 1TB HFS+ (with my data)

How can I effectively change the NTFS to HFS? I tried using Clonezilla but it can't clone a partition with a destination on the same disk.

I don't want to use traditional copy/paste/rsync etc because the data has a ton of tiny files, so it is MUCH faster to do it with something like clonezilla.

If no suggestions on here, I will probably image the 500GB data to an external drive, then image it back, but I think I tried that before and it didn't work so well....

2 Answers 2

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Clonezilla is an imaging tool, copying things at the block level, hence it will copy the whole filesystem format along the way.

Since you want to migrate across filesytem types, you have no choice but to work at the file level. In that case,

  • copy/paste is definitely not recommended.
  • rsync could be slow with lots of small files at start during the analysis phase, but its sync features and general wealth of settings would allow you to properly configure behavior and translate/preserve various meta informations, and interrupt then resume anytime. Also, --dry-run.
  • ditto is a nice tool too, but be sure to read the man page properly, as the semantics of source and destination paths can be surprising (it does NOT work like cp).
  • tar -cf - -C /path/to/source . | tar -xvf - -C /path/to/destination works great too, especially with lots of small files. Pipe the tar -c into tar -tvf - instead to preview your action.
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You'd probably need to consider the use of some resize tool like gparted rather than imaging. No idea what's native for OS X but you should be able to run gparted off a livecd.

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