BLARGiAMdEAD Posted January 3, 2011 Share Posted January 3, 2011 I've had my Core i7 920 running stably for a year and a half now, and decided that I would give it a little boost this late in its life cycle: a brand new shiny solid state drive for booting, to lower the ridiculous boot time of my Asus P6T mobo and the ridiculous launch speed of some old Rosetta apps. This should be great, right? Well, it turns out that nowhere on this forum (that I could find, anyway) is there a guide for how to do this. I've compiled a basic idea of how to go about doing this, seeing as my Users directory approaches 500 GB and I've got a 32 GB SSD. What I want to do (based on what I've found on the Internet) is copy my install to my new drive, minus the 'Users' and 'Developer' folders to the new drive, and then symlink the missing directories to the matching ones on my HDD. This would also (hopefully) allow me to keep the HDD fully bootable in case of an emergency. My first SSD I bought (a Patriot PS-100, notoriously slow and unreliable) died after a failed vanilla OS X install and Carbon Copy Cloner pausing after copying 47 MB. I got a replacement for that, which also crashed and burned after I failed to make a vanilla install bootable and tried to use Carbon Copy Cloner again. At this point, my confidence in Patriot had been shattered, so my next acquisition was an OCZ Onyx, which is rated lower speed but has gotten much more favorable reviews. This one utterly failed to die miserably, and so I tried a third option: manually copying over my files. Of course, the idiot that I am, I had forgotten about the hidden files, such as, for example, the kernel. When I attempted to boot I thus naturally received a missing kernel message. I booted back into my working Snow Leo install and tried to copy the remaining files using "sudo cp -r -v -p -n *.* /Volumes/Blizzard/" (Blizzard is my SSD, and I know that the pun is horrible). This copied some things, but failed to copy some other important things, such as, again, the kernel. I am now attempting to use Carbon Copy Cloner again (and this time, my drive hasn't died!), using 'Incremental backup' to avoid copying my huge Users and Developer directories. Now that that enormous wall of text has been completed, the meat of the issue: Is there anything I have to do to make the result bootable, and anything I have to do to the permissions so that they aren't all screwy? If I succeed in this, I intend to make a simple step-by-step guide for upgrading an existing Hackintosh with hundreds of gigabytes of data to a boot SSD, to spare others all the hours I have put into this. Thanks, and such. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/241595-upgrading-to-an-ssd/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted January 3, 2011 Share Posted January 3, 2011 I don't know if that's even possible, cloning an install by copying files over manually. Why don't you just install Snow Leopard from scratch on the SSD? Seems like you should have done that from the start, that would have given you a whole lot less trouble. The big plus side is that you have a working Snow Leopard installation already, all you have to do is match the configuration and add the files that makes it work on your PC. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/241595-upgrading-to-an-ssd/#findComment-1614087 Share on other sites More sharing options...
BLARGiAMdEAD Posted January 3, 2011 Author Share Posted January 3, 2011 I don't know if that's even possible, cloning an install by copying files over manually. Why don't you just install Snow Leopard from scratch on the SSD? Seems like you should have done that from the start, that would have given you a whole lot less trouble. The big plus side is that you have a working Snow Leopard installation already, all you have to do is match the configuration and add the files that makes it work on your PC. I did that with one of the earlier drives, but I couldn't match the settings exactly or something. It gave me a "couldn't find boot volume" error and wouldn't boot. I then tried using CCC, but the drive died midway. Okay, CCC does in fact make it bootable. However, my preferences seem to have vanished. Boot time seems to be only about a third the length, even verbose, which is good. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/241595-upgrading-to-an-ssd/#findComment-1614095 Share on other sites More sharing options...
BLARGiAMdEAD Posted January 4, 2011 Author Share Posted January 4, 2011 Update: it does in fact boot now from the SSD. However, most of the time when I log in it says that my home folder can't be detected or 'isn't in the usual place'. None of my settings are retained or anything. After a few tries at logging in, though, it will find my home folder and my Dock and Desktop background and login items will all be back in place. Any idea what could cause this? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/241595-upgrading-to-an-ssd/#findComment-1614223 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted January 4, 2011 Share Posted January 4, 2011 Sorry not a clue, I've never used CCC. Hopefully someone else knows what's going on. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/241595-upgrading-to-an-ssd/#findComment-1614225 Share on other sites More sharing options...
BLARGiAMdEAD Posted January 4, 2011 Author Share Posted January 4, 2011 Pretty sure it's not a problem with CCC. I think it has to do with the symlink, but I can't be sure. Once it's logged in successfully once, it keeps working, though. And it retrieves settings fine for other accounts. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/241595-upgrading-to-an-ssd/#findComment-1614238 Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacUser2525 Posted January 4, 2011 Share Posted January 4, 2011 Pretty sure it's not a problem with CCC. I think it has to do with the symlink, but I can't be sure. Once it's logged in successfully once, it keeps working, though. And it retrieves settings fine for other accounts. Don't bother with a symbolic link for the home folder go into the account under Users in the System Preferences and point to the actual folder containing your new home directory. You need to unlock then use Advanced to set it when you reboot it should use that folder. Now if you have the old home directory still in the /Users folder then once you confirm that it is using the new home by looking at the folder that contains the new and seeing the house icon remove the old otherwise some programs will still keep saving stuff there no matter what the setting tells them to do. You may want to read this page I found when I did this a few years ago particularly the response to Prillio from Scott about the rest of the folders you are trying to do this with and see if what he has to say applies to your situation. http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-move-the-h...n-os-x-and-why/ Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/241595-upgrading-to-an-ssd/#findComment-1614295 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts