I wrote about hybrid hard drives in the last article of this Tech Tails issue, and one critical step in any hard drive upgrade or replacement is to clone your data from the old drive to the new drive. There are several ways to accomplish this, but in my book the easiest way is to use Disk Utility while booted from the install disk that came with your Mac. This is the approach I’ll focus on. You will need an external hard drive enclosure like this model from EzQuest.
Once you’ve installed your new hard drive (there are excellent instructions at iFixIt, Apple’s support site and, depending on the model, in your owner’s manual), you’ll want to move your data to the new drive to hit the ground running.
With the new drive installed and your computer reassembled, power it on. A folder labeled with a question mark will flash repeatedly, but a few moments after you insert the Install Disc 1 into your disc drive, the flashing folder will go away. At this point, you’ll be at the gray screen with Apple logo and “spinning gear.” Because your optical (CD/DVD) drive is much slower than your hard drive, the boot process will be considerably slower than normal.
Take this longer-than-normal startup to install your old hard drive into the enclosure, and connect it to your computer.
You’ll be asked to select a language. That done, you’ll arrive at the main installation screen, the top of which will have a Utilities menu; select Disk Utility from there. You’ll see your old hard drive at left once Disk Utility opens up with an orange icon. Notice that this entry will have the device on top, and the logical volume indented beneath. Another entry, with the familiar silver icon representing a hard drive will appear in the same list; the hybrid hard drive entry will most likely read 500.11 GB ST95005620AS Media, as it does on my laptop.
Click on this hybrid hard drive entry, then click on the Erase tab on the right. Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format (that’s the default), give it a name (Macintosh HD is traditional), then click Erase. Answer affirmatively to the next prompts.
Your new hard drive is now ready to accept data. You’ll notice that its entry at left now has a logical volume listed beneath it, indented like the orange icon of the external drive.
Now, ensuring that you’ve selected your new hard drive on the left, click on the Restore tab at right. Drag the logical volume representing your external (old) hard drive to the source field. Then drag the logical volume representing your internal hard drive to the Destination field. Click Restore. Wait. It could be a few hours. If it takes more than a few hours, you might be looking at hard drive or related failure.
Once the process is done, you can quit out of Disk Utility, then quit out of Installer, and restart your Mac from your new hard drive!