I am about to upgrade the hard disk of my MacBook. (From 60GB to 320GB, which I know is below the limit of 500GB).
I was both able to install an OS X on the new drive and also to transfer the old hard disks partition to the new one with a sysresccd (linux live disk) and dd (dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda, so entire disk). So it's not a problem of hardware, limitations or restrictions.
So, after having transferred the 60 GB-disk to the new one, every partition manager would show me that there is about 260GB left on the disk, but none would allow me to resize the partition.
The Disk Utility on the OS X installation cd allowes to resize, but also erases the data. I tried to copy (dd) the old partition into the new, bigger one (dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/sda2), but then the system would refuse to boot.
What I have not yet tried is creating manually a partition, then copying all the contents (with hfsplus-support on the linux live disk), because I suppose this partition would not boot either.
Is there a way to either resize the partition after having copied the entire disk, or to render the manually resized partition bootable ?
Best Answer
Just cleanly partition the new disk to any size you like and copy the data over with Carbon Copy Cloner. It will be bootable and have the size you want.
You can do that on a running system, and don't need any live cd's or anything, just an usb or firewire interface for the new/second harddisk.