How To Clone iMac HDD to SSD

i've been working on restoring this old 2011 imac and need to replace the old hard drive with this new faster one however i don't want to lose any data so in this video i'm going to show you how to backup all your information and install mac os on a new hard drive let's go [Music] for this video i'll be using a western digital blue solid state drive or ssd for short in 2020 a 500 gigabyte ssd like this cost about 65 dollars and is well worth the cost because it's so much faster than a regular hard drive upgrading to an ssd is usually the best thing you can do to make your computer run faster now looking more closely we can see there's a connection for the power and the sata3 cable and on the other side is a big blue sticker the only thing in the box were the instructions and the solid state drive now because this is a new drive there's currently no data on it so to back up the information off my imac i'm going to use this external enclosure there's an adapter for the power and sata 3 port so the ssd will easily plug into it make sure to remove any stickers before trying to plug it in once the sticker is removed align the sata and power ports to the enclosure and slide it down put the top cover on and you're good to go last step is to plug in the usb cable notice that the usb port is blue so that means it uses a usb 3 connection plug that same cable into the usb port on the imac then turn on the computer and after it boots up turn on the external drive you'll then likely get an error message that says the disk is not readable it needs to be formatted so it's mac os compatible instead of windows so to fix that click initialize after waiting you'll be brought to this new screen where you can see the two hard drives located on the left i highly recommend right-clicking and renaming the drives so you don't get them confused this one here is the old hard drive so click on it and you'll notice that it says mac os extended journaled it's very important that you notate the exact format once you have that down click on the new hard drive go to the top menu and click erase then you'll be given the option to rename the drive and i'm going to call it wd ssd so i know which one it is next click the menu underneath the name field and make sure the format matches exactly with the old hard drive then click erase to format the drive i sped things up for this video but once it's done you'll get an option asking if you want to use it for time machine make sure you select don't use you can then click show details to make sure everything ran correctly if there were any problems formatting the drive they're usually listed here once i close that screen i can see that the new solid state drive is now formatted as mac os extended journaled with the drive in the right format i can now make a copy of my old hard drive to the new one to get started with a copy i need to first restart my computer however as it's restarting it's very important that you hit command r when it boots up it may take a little bit longer to load but once it's done it will take you to the utilities menu from here you can do a time machine restore or reinstall mac os but i'm going to choose disk utility from here you can see that there are three hard drives available even though it shows there's three drives there's physically only two the first is the old hard disk drive inside the imac our external drive this disk image shows the operating system clicking on the new ssd we have two options we can either do a clean install of mac os or we can restore all the data from the old hard drive to the new one by cloning it you don't need to do both options but you'll want to choose one or the other i'm just going to quickly show you how to do both now i'll show you how to do a clean install of mac os make sure you're highlighting the new ssd and go to the top and click restore you'll be shown a drop down menu where you can choose which drive you want to copy i selected the os x based system option which will allow me to make a copy of that to the new solid state drive so to begin go down and click restore this takes some time so i'll skip ahead i first want to verify that everything looks good then i go down and hit done now you can see that instead of wd ssd it now says osx based system this is just the base system so you'll need to close this window and go to the previous screen and select reinstall mac os when that's complete it will be as if your mac is brand new you can also throw in a usb drive and make that bootable as well alright now i'm going to show you the second option of how to clone a drive go up to the top and hit erase then i'm going to repeat the same process as before and select the right format which is journaled again make sure it's exactly the same as the old hard drive and go down and select erase when that's complete hit done and we're back to where we started so to clone the old hard drive make sure i select the ssd and instead of choosing the osx based system i'm going to choose hdd old now i'm set to clone the old hard drive to the new one so i select restore now this can take quite a bit of time especially if you have a lot of information on your old hard drive so make sure you plan 30 to 60 minutes and with that i now have a clone of the old hard drive so i don't get it confused i'm going to go back and rename it then test that everything copied over to test it i go to the apple menu and select startup disk i'll then be brought to a window where i can choose which hard drive i want to boot off of i don't want to boot from the old hard drive but instead we'll select the new hard drive to boot from with that selected i then hit restart it may take a little bit longer to boot up as long as the light is blinking everything should be fine the login screen has my same information and the computer booted up correctly with all of my old programs and i can see that i now have a clone copy of the old hard drive on the new solid state drive with everything copied over i can now disconnect the solid state drive but first need to shut down the mac i need to shut it down first and not just eject it because everything is booting off the external hard drive and that's a win we now have a copy of the old hard drive on this new solid state drive if you want to see how to replace the old hard drive with a new one check that video out thanks so much for watching and have a great day [Music] you

Channel: The BeefMaster

Views: 297,639

Keywords: the beefmaster, macOS, macos install on new ssd, macos install from bootable usb, how to, how to clone hard drive to ssd, macbook pro clone, how to clone mac, disk utility clone, copy mac hard drive to ssd, how to clone mac os x to new hdd or ssd, clone macbook pro hard drive to ssd, clone mac, clone mac hard drive, clone mac hdd to ssd, replace ssd imac 2011, replace imac hdd with ssd, how to clone iMac HDD to SSD, solid state drive, imac ssd, how to clone a macbook pro

Id: oB4FlLduMd0

Length: 6min 59sec (419 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020