best way to upgrade a working HDD
 

Hello,

I have a perfectly working HDD in a MBP on OSX Lion, with FV2 enabled.

I want to replace the drive with a newer, bigger faster drive and use SD to clone the original drive, including the recovery volume.

It seems one obvious way to do this would be to perform an SD backup, then restore to the new drive. However, I'm thinking that it should also be possible to use SD to backup to the new drive, thus saving a recovery step.

I have a Firewire to SATA connector to attach the new drive to the MBP.

My plan is to attach the new drive, leave it unencrypted at this point, and use SD to backup to the new drive.

Then replace the internal drive with the newly created SD drive and then enable FV2.

Is this the best way to do this?

What happens to the recovery partition? If it's lost is there a way to recreate it? (I have already made a OSX Lion install disk...perhaps there's a way to use that to create a recovery partition?)

Corby

We don't copy the recovery partition. Basically, I'd suggest installing Lion to the new drive, then - when prompted to 'copy from another Mac' - point at the backup volume. That'll bring in your applications and data.

You may also want to create a recovery USB drive with Apple's 'recovery disk assistant'.

Indeed, I think that's the solution. I tried using the recovery partition to do a restore to an external disk and that failed. (actually, it seemed that *might* work but the system went to sleep and I wasn't willing to hang around pressing the track pad on occasion to keep it awake).

Indeed I have a recovery assistant USB drive already made, but there doesn't seem to be a way to put that on to the HDD after the fact.

Also, whenever I try to boot using the USB the system appears to check first if there's a recovery partition on the HDD and will use that, if it finds it. Lot's of quirks to this...I think Apple needs to figure out all the permutations of recovery methods, especially when FV2 is involved.

Thanks

The whole thing feels like a bit of a mess with "older", non-EFI recovery Macs.

Are there any older, non-efi macs that support Lion?

BTW, I am writing this while booted from an external SD copy that is currently restoring to a new disk.

Sadly, I think the new disk may be defective....it's a new 7200rpm and behaving much slower than my old 5400rpm drive.

It's nice to know that I can
1) use the external SD drive while I restore and
2) know that I can restore!

Great product....I probably wouldn't have considered doing this upgrade if I didn't have confidence in the backup/restore process.