Carbon Copy Cloner

Today, I upgraded my MacBook Pro's hard drive. I replaced it with a 7200 rpm 500GB HDD from Seagate. My system is a newer model and therefore I didn't require the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware update 1.7, which addressed a problem with higher capacity and higher speed SATA drives.

My upgrade was actually a very smooth process, thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner from Mike Bombich. Mike, thank you very much for building a fantastic product. I shall surely be sending a donation your way, not for saving my butt, but for building a great product!

Step 1: Place your target hard drive in an external USB or Firewire enclosure. I placed my 500GB drive in the external USB enclosure and connected it to my Mac.

Step 2: Partition the target hard drive using the Intel GUID partition format. Use Disk Utility to get that job done.

Step 3: Clone your system's drive onto the target hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. My system's drive is a 250GB drive. Carbon Copy Cloner went to work and in a couple of hours, my data was cloned.

Step 4: Remove your Mac's drive and replace it with your target hard drive. I followed the instructions from OWC's upgrade video.

Step 5: Ensure that you have properly closed your Mac.

Step 6: Boot up. It may take a little while at the first attempt, but soon you shall see your system boot up, with an upgraded disk capacity and everything in place as-is! I usually have verbose boot up messages turned on.