Cloning a Mac Drive

Tech
#1

is there an easy way to clone a mac drive, ive been struggling these past few weeks to make a 1:1 clone of it

tried doing it with ghost didnt work
tried doing it with the build in disk utility of Mac Os, it tells me it cannot unmount the primary drive in order to clone it.
installed a trail copy of carbon copy cloner for Mac Os, drive did clone but doesnt want to boot, im guessing the efi boot section didnt copy

only other options i can think of is
try clonezilla, maybe it will work
reinstall high sierra and redownload everything (will use lots of bandwidth to redownload all of those apps)

any other apps that might work ?

#2

No, because Mac

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#3

still better than windows 10 :wink:

#4

No

…

3 Likes
#5

Windows 10 is my best OS since Windows 2000

3 Likes
#6

No

You can use DD though

#7

i was looking for a non command line solution, the issue is will the drive unmount ? i will try tonight again

#8

That does not compute

#9

it doesnt want to unmount with the official built in diskutility, even with my administrator profile.

i have a feeling this is not going to work
diskutil unmountDisk

#10

You’re not booting into the recovery partition before attempting to clone ONLY the OS partition are you?

#11

If you have access to the Mac to do a Disk Utility clone, that should work. I did it to install an SSD in my Macbook Pro. You access Disk Utility via the Recovery.

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#12

when i boot into the recovery partition disk utility does not see the external usb drive, but in Mac os it does, but then i cant unmount the primary drive. its just weird which means that even if if open a terminal window in recovery i wont be able copy the disk image, i dont know if its an issue with the chinese external case im using or what. or maybe it doesnt load any usb drivers (which i doubt since the input devices work) when i boot into recovery mode and thats why it doesnt see the external.

Maybe this will help its a Quad Core Xeon Mac pro with 4 gigs of ram and a radeon 5770

#13

in recovery mode disk utility does not see the external, when booted normally it immediately picks up the external and shows the icon on the desktop but then i cant unmount the primary drive via disk utility.

not antivirus apps are installed, the only root level type of apps i have that starts up with the main os is cleanmymac and paragon’s ntfs for Mac

#14

How is the external drive formatted? Remember it needs to have a GUID partition table formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

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#15

it is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) it was initially formatted as apfs

im also sure its GUID and not MBR

#16

I’d redo it just to be 100% sure

#17

if i have time i’ll try tonight again

#18

Fortunately and unfortunately because Apple has such a tight control over what hardware goes into their machines they don’t really understand all the complexities of what actual power users require from their software. Whenever I get frustrated with my Mac it’s because it won’t let me do what I know I’m comfortable doing.

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#19

i like the minimalist feel of mac os compared to windows some features or lack there of are annoying but nothing is forced on you, yes if there is an update for the os or an app in the appstore you’ll have a notification for that but its not forced on you, windows on the other hand especially windows 10 forces stuff on you, forces updates, forces ads in the start menu etc. you dont feel like you own or are in full control of the OS, thats why my thinkpad is still running windows 7.

i only use the mac for productivity however it makes me concentrate more, whenever i want to work in windows my mind wonders and i do other stuff within the os