Is there a way for me to duplicate a Mac disk drive on Windows, preferably without cost?
My friend wants to upgrade her MacBook Pro 2011’s 500GB HDD to a 250GB SSD with SATA III. My plan is to use Mac’s Disk Utility by placing the SSD in a USB box, but this won’t work due to the laptop’s USB 2.0 and the SSD’s smaller size. I would have to resize a live partition somehow.
Alternatively, I can put both disks in external boxes and use USB 3 speeds by connecting them to my Windows laptop. However, I’m not sure if this process would work since I need proper filesystem drivers such as APFS and/or HFS+. Although I found Paragon drivers that offer read access to the drives for free, I’m unsure if this approach will work. Any advice or feedback is appreciated.
2 Answers
It’s recommended that you shrink the partition first, regardless of the method or tools you’ll use for cloning. There are some free utilities in Windows that can handle the unique file system.