Cloning a Mac / Bootcamp disk to a larger drive

OWC and others recommend that you do a fresh installation when moving a Mac with Windows BootCamp to a larger drive.  That is probably a good idea.

Sometimes you just decide to do things the hard way. This is what I did for my Macbook Air when I bought a larger SSD.  It had OS/X on the first partition and Windows 7 on the second partition.


  1. Backup your data.
  2. Create a Clozilla bootable thumb drive.
  3. Get an OWC drive with external case. Plug in the new drive in the external case.
  4. Boot Clonezilla from the thumb drive. 
  5. Clone the internal disk to the new, larger, external disk.
    1. Make an exact copy of the disk using Clonezilla.
    2. This exact copy will not make use of the full drive.
  6. Power off the machine
  7. Remove the old disk. 
  8. Install the new disk inside your machine.
  9. Boot into the mac OS on the disk you just installed.
  10. Move GPT bookkeeping data to the actual end of the disk. Download and use gdisk to copy the MBR/GPT info to the end of the new drive. You may be able to do this from inside clonezilla.
    1. Run“sudo gdisk” from a Mac terminal  
    2. Enter expert mode. Type “x” and hit “Enter”.  
    3. Move the backup GPT data structures from the end of the old disk length to the end of the new disk. Type “e”  and hit “Enter”.   
    4. Exit gdisk. Type “w” and hit “Enter”.
  11. Reboot into the Windows OS
  12. Run the check disk utility to verify the disk.
  13. Extend the Windows partition to fill the empty portion of the disk.
    1. Download Mini Tool Partition Wizard
    2. Use MTPW to extend the windows partition to fill the disk.
  14. Restart into OS/X
  15. Use CampTune to reallocate some space from the Windows partition to the OS/X partition.
    • CampTune may tell you it needs to re-align the MBR and GPT.  Let it.
  16. Party like its 1999.

Early step of this are based on http://www.ourfunkyfamily.com/machinations/?p=8

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