As part of my new Hacintosh build (this is the 4th in a series of posts about it), I wanted to move the two internal hard drives from the old computer to the new. In the old computer, I had the internal system drive and two additional internal drives – a 1Tb drive for TimeMachine and a 2 Tb drive for Music, Pictures, and Movies.
I could have just pulled the drives from the old computer and plugged them into the new computer and been done. But with HDD hardware, it’s not a question of if they will fail but when and 6 years into their life they are obviously more prone to failure than they were when they were new. Also, I wanted to increase the sizes. Now 6 years later, disk space is cheap and resources get consumed so I wanted to increase the size of the drives in the new computer but still function with the same layout. So in addition to my system drive in the new computer, I would also end up with two 6 Tb drives taking on the same roles as in the old computer.
And therefore this long post is all about how I did eventually succeed in getting the drives migrated. It was way more complicated than it should have been. I should not have been surprised since my problem with Apple is that while things work well within their tidy little world, but as soon as you go beyond the mainstream, you find lots of problems and this is certainly one of those cases. If you want to skip the failed attempts, jump right to Attempt 9 where I describe the attempt that did succeed. But for the sake of anyone trying other things, I’ll describe where those other problems hit me and could you too. Note that I’m no expert on the subject of hard drive migration but given that it took a few days to work through all of this, I’ve got a lot more familiarity with this than I did at the start!
As usual, if anything written here causes computer failure or data loss or anything else happens to you as a consequence of what I have written, whether legal, physical, or emotional, it’s all on you. And if things like creating partitions, typing in terminal, or making changes in the BIOS are tasks with which you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable, now is a good time to click the “Back” button in your browser and go somewhere else. But thanks for visiting.
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