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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding your WSL2 RAM and swap - Changing the default 50%-25%

Image
The Windows Subsystem for Linux operates as a virtual machine that can dynamically grow the amount of RAM to a maximum set at startup time.  Microsoft sets a default maximum RAM available to 50% of the physical memory and a swap-space that is 1/4 of the maximum WSL RAM.  You can scale those numbers up or down to allocate more or less RAM to the Linux instance. The first drawing shows the default WSL memory and swap space sizing. The images below show a developer machine that is running a dev environment in WSL2 and Docker Desktop.  Docker Desktop has two of its own WSL modules that need to be accounted for.  You can see that the memory would actually be oversubscribed, 3 x 50% if every VM used its maximum memory.  The actual amount of memory used is significantly smaller allowing every piece to fit. Click to Enlarge The second drawing shows the memory allocation on my 64GB laptop. WSL Linux defaults to a maximum RAM size of 5
Read more

Installing the RNDIS driver on Windows 11 to use USB Raspberry Pi as network attached

Image
I do a lot of my development and configuration via ssh into my Raspberry Pi Zero over the RNDIS connection. Some models of the Raspberry PIs can be configured with  gadget drivers  that let the Raspberry pi emulate different devices when plugged into computers via USB. My favorite gadget  is the network profile that makes a Raspberry Pi look like an RNDIS-attached network device.  All types of network services travel over an RNDIS device without knowing it is a USB hardware connection. A Raspberry Pi shows up as a Remote NDIS (RNDIS) device when you plug the Pi into a PC or Mac via a USB cable. The gadget  in the Windows Device Manager picture shows this RNDIS Gadget connectivity between a Windows machine and a Raspberry Pi. The Problem Windows 11 and Windows 10 no longer auto-installs the RNDIS driver that makes magic happen. Windows recognizes that the Raspberry Pi is some type of generic USB COM device. Manually running W indows Update  or  Update Driver  does  not  install the RNDI
Read more

DNS for Azure Point to Site (P2S) VPN - getting the internal IPs

Image
I wanted to access all my Azure resources without making any of them visible to the Internet.   The easiest give my local machine access to everything on my Azure Virtual Network (VNET) was to connect to it over VPN. It turns out creating Azure VPN gateways and connecting to Azure VPN endpoints is easy.  There are some subtleties in getting DNS name resolution to work that can confuse when first starting out. Setting the Stage There are a few ways to get to Azure endpoints and resources that are blocked from the internet.  We can  Create a Point-to-Site connection from our local machines to Azure Network Gateways Create a Site-to-Site network connection from our local networks to Azure Network Gateways. Use Bastion Hosts Use Cloud Shell Leave everything open to the internet. I chose a Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN connection that connects from my laptop to a VNet Gateway.  That joins my laptop
Read more