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I have a 640GB hard drive that is failing some diagnostic checks. It still functions, but the computer is unbearably slow, with disk I/O as the clear culprit. The disk in question in installed in an old Mac Mini. It has 4 partitions that include space for both Windows 10 and OS X.
Normally, I'd just back up the data, install my new OS and applications to a new disk, restore the data, and be on my way. In this case, however, it took a considerable amount of effort and trial-and-error to get both of those operating systems working at the same time, and Windows is not technically supported at all on the old Mac Mini. I don't want to repeat this process.
In short, I want to somehow clone the disk.
To that end, I've come by a new 240GB SSD, and I'd like to move everything on the old 640GB HDD to the new 240GB SSD. Most of the 640GB disk is empty, such that it should all fit easily on 240GB SSD, as long as I size partitions carefully.
I know enough to be able to shrink one partition and move the one partition to the new disk via Clonezilla. However, I don't know how to do this for the whole disk, I'm not sure on how to correctly shrink the OS X partition, and I'm not sure on preserving the boot loader in this situation. Other questions here also cover as much as handling one partition, but none seem to address shrinking multiple partitions while preserving the boot loader.
Can anyone describe in detail the exact steps I need to move the whole disk, without breaking either installed OS? Is it even possible?
Joel Coehoorn
Posted 2015-11-30T02:57:46.730
Reputation: 26 787
How is the partition table laid out? I'm not sure about going from an HDD to and SSD, but at a minimum you might be able to shrink all of the partitions such that they can fit in the 240GB boundary and leave an empty partition at the end of the 640 disk; then potentially clone the whole disk that way and the empty partition just won't get copied in the full disk copy .. (I've done this before with an old server HDD going from bigger drive to smaller, but it was a multi-partition single system, not dual boot) – txtechhelp – 2015-11-30T03:13:08.233
A dualboot is going to be tricky, I've done this on a single boot, windows only box and you'd need something that understands cloning both OS X and windows and can resize em. Do you have enough space somewhere to do a full image backup in case things go horribly wrong? – Journeyman Geek – 2015-11-30T03:57:17.103
No, but I do have extra copies of the data, so in the worst case I have to start from scratch with the OS installs. Again: I'd really like to avoid that, but I will if I must. – Joel Coehoorn – 2015-11-30T14:30:56.287