Remember the hard drive I ordered in September? It shipped yesterday. Yeah, I know.
Another thing you might remember is the awfully complicated (but, I tell myself, completely necessary) plan I came up with to migrate the files. Thanks to some suspicious behavior and subsequent Help file reading, it turns out Disk Utility’s Restore functionality is much smarter than I thought - it copies all files and metadata off of a drive or disk image, which is what I want. It does not do a bit-for-bit copy of the whole partition inside, as I originally thought. This effectively reduces my outline to this:
- Shut down computer.
- Attach new hard drive to IDE to USB/SATA-adapter, and the adapter to the computer. (Yes, USB is plug-and-play, but I do not want to risk having to pull the hard drive out unannounced, and earlier testing shows that just dismounting the volume will not shut down the hard drive, nor will putting the computer to sleep.)
- Boot up with a Mac OS X disc.
- Using Disk Utility, partition and format the new disk.
- Using Disk Utility, “Restore” the main partition with the contents of the old disk.
- Shut down computer.
- Boot up with the new disk once to verify that it works.
- Celebrate/rejoice, depending on phase of moon. Alternatively, make necessary adjustments to bodge new disk into booting properly.
- Shut down computer.
- Unhook USB adapter and perform actual swap of old and new hard drive.
- There is no step 11.