So, I looked around for a way to 'squeeze' the larger disk image into the slightly smaller SSD, but I couldn't find anything. There's only about 300 GB of data on the 498 GB drive so I thought I could just create an image file of the source drive and then restore it to the new SSD, but it complained about the SSD drive being too small to restore the backup to. In my case I had a 498 GB 5200 RPM drive that I was replacing with a 480GB SSD. Repartition the Source Drive and You Won't Lose Data.

I've used iopending to see that pending disk operations are, in fact, slowing me down. How can I clone my data from the larger drive onto the new, smaller drive?

I'd love a solution that uses solely built-in Apple tools (like Disk Utility or asr) or something open source. I just want to boot to the new drive and have it work.Īlso, I'm using FileVault on the old drive. I don't want any changes to file modification times or permissions, etc. To be clear: what I want is an exact clone, byte-for-byte.

Resize the partition on the source drive to be smaller than the destination drive.

I don't like this option because 1) I think it shouldn't be necessary and 2) I want to limit how many pieces of software and companies I trust with my data

Use some third-party, commercial software instead.

I get an error like 'not enough space on /dev/disk13s2', meaning, I think, 'the destination drive is too small.' ( ( ) gives the exact same error.)

Try to restore the main hard drive to the SSD.

Use Disk Utility to erase and rename the new drive (plugged into USB with a USB-to-SATA adapter cable).

Reboot OSX, holding Command + R, to boot into recovery mode.

The data I have on the larger drive will fit on the smaller one.

I'm replacing my spinning disk drive with a smaller SSD, because it should make my system much faster.

Imac clone hard drive to ssd