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I have Leopard installed on this slow Samsung 500GB drive and I recently got a shiny new 750GB Hitachi (noisy but faast) and I'd like to move my OSX installation to the new drive.

 

Is it just a case of rsync -a everything to the new drive and dd if=/dev/disk0s2 of=/dev/disk2s2 bs=512 count=1 to copy over the MBR? - Or do I need to do something else?

 

I'm more of a Linux user so I know I need to exclude /dev, /proc and /sys directories from rsync but create them with correct permissions on the target drive - is there any similar gotchas with copying OSX over to a new drive?

You might consider just dd'ing the whole thing, then expanding the partition after it's on the new drive.

 

dd if=/dev/olddisk of=/dev/newdisk bs=1m

 

That will preserve every bit exactly as it is, and in theory it should boot (that will take a long, long time to complete though). I'm not sure what your resizing options are with an MBR, though, I've only resized on GUID.

if you have a time machine backup, you could just reboot on the new/bigger drive. install the os like normal and, when it is finished installing , it'll ask you if you want to transfer your info from a time machine back up , click yes..... you just have to update back up to 10.5.2( pretty easy with the kalyway update) and run the software update for itunes, safari and, whatever else...

Thanks for the advice, I am dd'ing the partition over as I type this ;) -- I'd rather not muck about with timemachine and what not because it was difficult enough getting this thing running as I want (network drivers, sound drives, video drivers, new kernel, all my permissions and network mount points, etc that time machine won't restore).

 

I will report on the dd when it's done. Probably in 8 hours or so :)

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