Martin Kausche

Replace hard-drive without reinstalling MacOS

06 Dec 2018

Goal: Replace the old 500GB HDD of the Mac Mini with a new 500GB SSD without the need of reinstalling MacOS again (see why here).

Since I wanted to avoid a new installation at all costs, the old hard disk had to be completely cloned to the new one. Fortunately, the hard disks are the same size, so there is no need to adjust the partitions or anything like that.

Fortunately all needed programs are already shipped with MacOS, our tool of choice is the Disk Utility.app which can be found in Applications –> Utilities. To be able to clone our current hard drive the first thing we need is a way to connect both hard-drives at the same time, I decided to use a simple USB hard-disc case.

Since we want an exact clone we need to be able to unmount the drive, fortunately the Disk Utility.app is also available in Recovery Mode.

Steps:

  • start your Mac in Recovery mode by pressing Command (⌘)-R at the startup
  • open the Disk Utility from the menu
  • important: even if you will be erasing everything on the new drive, you still need to format it!
    otherwise the Disk Utility wont let you restore your current drive to the new one
    it will instead grumble about your old drive being formatted in some wrong way
    formatting can also be done with the Disk Utility (who would have thought that?)
  • now select your new drive (connected via USB) and press Restore
  • select the old drive as source for restoring
  • get yourself something else to to, this will keep some time

Now its time to replace the hard disc, you can google find many HowTos online.

  • be careful with the metal cover and your RAM!
  • the HowTos tell you you need to lift some tape and unplug the WiFi - I could just put aside the metal cover without unplugging the WiFi.
  • one very helpful hint was to use a plastic card as kind of ramp to insert the drive - you’ll know what I mean when you’re at this point.

After reassembly everything started up as usual, but waaay faster - great!

I kept the old drive untouched for some time, you never know :)

Tags:  macOS ,  Hardware