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Released on October 23, 2012. Core i5 or Core i7 Processor. Apple Fusion Drive.

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Question about HDD to SSD swap

Ok. So I’m no expert on the subject I would say I’m borderline intermediate so please bare with me. The only information I’m getting online about formatting a new hard drive is “cloning”. What if I don’t need to transfer anything from my old hard drive? Do I still need to clone? I’m confused about that part. Like if I install a fresh ssd out of the box into my Mac mini and turn it on the computer will boot up? Are there other steps involved? If I’m not making sense I apologize but if I am a little help on the subject would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

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Anything past 10.7-10.12 is not safe to clone due to the recovery partition not carrying over correctly, and 10.13-present uses APFS which is still a WIP so nobody has released a cloning tool that works with it. Start over from scratch on the OS - cloning does not work and has been a problem for years.

What you need to do is make a Time Machine backup (or use the old drive) and install the new drive into the Mac, and use Internet Recovery (will get the latest version). The other option is to make a recovery USB by downloading a version of MacOS you want, and installing from the USB drive.

Mac OS X Image

Guide

How to create a bootable USB drive

Difficulty:

Easy

—

30 minutes - 2 hours
Mac Image

Guide

How to create a macOS Time Machine backup

Difficulty:

Very easy

—

30 minutes - 6 hours

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