Upgrading mac hard drive: Clone HD or Migration Assistant, which is least problematic for Parallels

I am upgrading the hard drive in my macbook pro and want to know which method of transferring to a new hard drive will be best for my Parallels 9 virtual machine on my mac. Should I clone the drive using software like Carbon Copy Cloner or should I do a clean install of my main operating system and use migration assistant to transfer my content over?

 

Ok, thanks

 

Nicholash2,

The choice depends on how much accumulated cruft is on your machine. In most cases, I just CCC clone the old drive to the new drive, either before or after physical installation, and continue with life. In my experience, PDM is perfectly happy running from a cloned replacement volume. In effect, cloning physically move the bits, but does not logically move the applications or data. The volume contents and structure are the same except, possibly, free space. Don't forget to have CCC create the recovery volume as well.

This works for PDM in particular because PDM does not care about the volume UUID, in contrast to some other applications which must be re-installed or re-authorized on a cloned volume.

Make certain to keep the old drive as a pre-upgrade backup until you have verified that all your applications continue to work. Do not overwrite this backup until you have run the new drive long enough to be satisfied it will not fail early.