Clone your entire Mac drive to new Mac OS X drive

Today, there are various methods to clone your old hard drive to new one. Before performing cloning you should format your new destination drive using disk utility. As we know, cloning process is recommended during migrating Mac applications, testing application and replacing old drive with new one.

Note: Before you start working with the clone of old Mac drive (created on new drive), ensure it has the same model and hardware requirements as your cloned drive.

Booting into Old Mac Drive:

Check if you have any external enclosure in order to plug your old drive via Firewire or USB. Note that Intel Mac users have only USB bootable option.

Now, while booting your Mac with old drive, just hold down the 'Option key' to go to startup manager showing all connected boot volumes (in case of lion+) in the form of icons as the option for boot.

Now, Click on your old Mac drive to boot it up, and let it to start normally.

Formatting Your New Mac Drive (Target drive):

Formatting new drive will be next important step that you will need to take before starting the cloning process. I am giving you short and simple instruction guide for formatting Mac drive process in Mac.

• Open Disk Utility(Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app)
• Select your new drive on left hand side of menu and then click on "Partition" tab.
• Now, click Options at the bottom side.
• Next step is to choose partition map for formatting.

In fourth step, you need to choose partition depending on your Mac processor. It means if you have a PPC based Mac then "Apple Partition Map" is the default partition map for all external drives. Although, if you are formatting drive for use as an Intel Mac machine then you should choose GUID partition map.

However, Intel based Mac's are able to do read and write operations on a drive with "Apple Partition Map", but one cannot boot the drive with this Partition map.

So, select GUID partition map for Intel Based Machines in order to boot your Mac from the hard drive.

Now, enter the name you want for this drive and click "Partition".

After clicking partition tab, you get a warning message "Partitioning a disk will destroy all the information on the volume of this disk." Then clicking to continue for formatting Partition.

Once it completes, you will see your new drive on desktop, with the same name that you had gave at the time of formatting.

Selecting the best Cloning Software:

There are various cloning apps present in the market. All third party software are similar in cloning and imaging abilities, but some may offer you some additional features. So, on the basis of ease of use, performance and advanced features we have chosen some best applications for cloning Mac drive.

1. Apple's Disk Utility (Mac OS X inbuilt tool) located in Applications > Utilities folder.

2. Stellar Drive Clone: http://www.stellarclonedrive.com/

3. Chronosync of Econtechnologies

Features including pros & cons of these three utilities are explained one by one:-

Apple's Disk Utility (10.3 X or Later Mac versions)    
                                          

Disk Utility is a great application provided by Apple to their Mac users. It performs many operations on Mac including repairing disk permissions on Mac, formatting drives, restoring and cloning. It has ability to create bootable clone of your drive like third party utilities. To do cloning with disk utility you need to follow below steps.                                                                     

1. Select your new drive/volume(target drive) and click on "Restore" tab.

2. Drag your old volume(drive or volume of which you want to create clone) to the Source field.

3. Drag your new target drive to its Destination field.

4. Click check box for "Erasing Destination".

5. Click restore at the bottom.

6. Now, it will start copying over to your new drive i.e destination drive.

Chronosync of Econ Technologies:

If you purchased chronosync cloning software for Mac, it is good but only for advanced users. Because, it has a bit complicated GUI, due to lack of hierarchial view. 

Although by investing $40 you are less with its part chronoagent (chronoagent is a aprt of chronosync required by user in order to get complete access of his backup kept at their destination end.

So, with this amount one will neither get complete access of backups nor schedule their Mac to backup on network drive.

Hence, one must buy chronoagent along with it and it cost $10, so as a full package one could say it -- expensive tool of $50.

In order to work with it one need to install chronoagent at destination drive while chronosync on your primary machine.

But, its additional feature that brings it in good Mac cloning software category is it can synchronize or backup almost anything connected to Mac machine. This will help you easily clone your old hard drive to your new hard drive.

So, basically in order to use all chronosync features you need to buy chronoagent with this.

Stellar Drive Clone software:

 Stellar Drive Clone is a great Mac cloning software for creating a bootable backup, image of your drive. 

Best thing I experience in this software is its self explanatory and interactive interface possess buttons as cloning,imaging and restore. (Download Here).

Its 2.5 version supports windows file formats on Mac like ExFat, Fat32, MBR partition scheme. Its cost just $39. For creating clone using Stellar Drive Clone one need to select his source disk (old drive/volume/folder) and destination disk (new drive/volume/folder). 

 

Its unique feature is that it works as a background process, means you can continue your work while cloning is in progress. Stellar Drive Clone is fast, easy and reliable Mac cloning software.

It also enables you to create clone on network drive.

Verification of 'bootable property' in cloned drive:

Once cloning process completes don't forget to verify whether the clone is bootable or not. To check this, restart Mac by holding "Option" key will show you all connected OS to your Mac. Here, you can select your preferable boot drive just by clicking it. In case you don’t see new cloned drive, you will need to do the cloning again. If it visible, just click on it to boot it up.

This will verify that your hard drive has cloned successfully.