[e.w.c]

hey guys

i have just bought a new 1tb ext drive and was wondering how i use this as a main drive instead of my mac's one. i want to free space on my mac and use the ext hard drive for everything. whats the best way to do this? all help is appreciated.

[Ken Gracey]

Hmm good question, from memory your Mac always looks for the internal drive before any USB or FireWire drive. The best option if your hard drive inside your Mac is to small would be to take the 1 TB drive out of its case and swapping it with the smaller one in your Mac

But after saying that, the only thing that springs to mind, which is not perfect would be to use something like carbon copy cloner, to make an exact copy of your drive onto your external drive, and then to reboot while holding down the option key, this should present you with the option to pick which drive you want to boot up from, you could then pick your external drive, of course you will have to do this every time you restart your Mac.

[e.w.c]

Ken Gracey, on 15 July 2012 - 08:16 PM, said:

Hmm good question, from memory your Mac always looks for the internal drive before any USB or FireWire drive. The best option if your hard drive inside your Mac is to small would be to take the 1 TB drive out of its case and swapping it with the smaller one in your Mac

But after saying that, the only thing that springs to mind, which is not perfect would be to use something like carbon copy cloner, to make an exact copy of your drive onto your external drive, and then to reboot while holding down the option key, this should present you with the option to pick which drive you want to boot up from, you could then pick your external drive, of course you will have to do this every time you restart your Mac.

Thanks for the quick reply. yeah changing the drive is something i dont really want to do. and the option key is no biggie as i use to do it when i had windows installed. is ccc hard to use?

[Ken Gracey]

No very very simple

http://www.bombich.com/

[Dylstra]

If you can install the OS onto the external drive, it's a simple matter of specifying that drive as the startup one (System Preferences, System tab).

[Dylstra]

I found this walkthrough. It seems straight forward enough, although, obviously, I haven't tried it and make no guarantees about the article.
http://www.makeuseof...drive-test-mac/

[Tom]

I have just spent the last 4 months working off a clone (while waiting for the new MacBook Pro). I can only recommend this if you have a fast machine (I didn't).