osx sudo dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1

Question

Am I doing this right? The process isn't very verbose

I am upgrading my HDD, I have a larger external drive I want inside my macbook.

I want to copy the contents and partitions of my internal mac HDD to another hdd which is currently plugged in via USB (it will be my new internal)

At first I had tried to partition the external drive with disk utility and then only dd certain partitions over, but dd wouldn't let me dd if/dev/disk0s2 which is my main system drive, it gave me resource busy error. So instead I did dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1 of the entire disk and its been going at it for an hour.

It went ahead and erased the partition structure I set up on my external, which is probably OKAY if it does not try to allocate one gigantic partition over the extra unpartitioned space. (The external is much larger than the disk I am cloning from.)

The process isn't very verbose and I can't see what is going on. I wanted to do this by booting to a live cd but I couldn't get this to work on this machine.

Solution

The drive being copied and the destination need to be completely inactive except for the copy operation. In order to copy your OS drive you will need to boot from an install disk. The Disk Utility application on the install disk can perform this operation or you can use dd if={disk} of={disk} bs={blocksize}. Be sure to set the block size correctly to avoid a LONG copy. You can check the status of the copy with kill -SIGINFO {pid}, which dumps statistics.

Comments

[cqm]

I cancelled my process and I was able to see that my complete disk copy was working - it created a partition only the size of the partitions on the origin disk. It was mountable (didn't try booting from it but I'm content that it will). And I will be able to add my other wanted partitions later. I'll restart the process for overnight.

[cqm]

But I think your way is better because I want to have a larger OSX partition. Maybe I'll just use SuperDuper