Adding a second HDD, can't format it...

[cotfessi]

Adding a second HDD, need to keep the files

I’ve been running an i7-3770K system a little over a year ago.(success post here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/user-buil...x670-2gb-vengeance-32gb-running-10-8-4-a.html) It has 32gb of RAM, a 2TB Seagate SATA HDD, and two 128GB SSDs. It’s been super stable.

I’ve got a second, older hackintosh with an i3 chip that is two years old. It had a 1.5TB Seagate SATA HDD in it. I need to downsize and get rid of this second computer. I would like to move the 1.5TB HDD from the old machine to my main machine.

Here are a couple of things:

- The drive is formatted in Mac OS Extended and has a lot of files that I don’t want to lose

- The drive was the only drive in the old machine and as such it has 2 partitions, one that has the system files, one that has my files

I’m wondering what steps I have to take to get this drive up and running in my new machine…

Are there any pitfalls or gotchas I need to watch out for?

Is there anything else I need to do to ensure that the machine doesn’t try to boot to this new drive as it technically has macOS on it?

 

[clipper99]

Just plug it in, your system should continue to boot from the drive it does from right now. Your title says you can't format but I didn't see you asking anything about that.

 

[cotfessi]

Just plug it in, your system should continue to boot from the drive it does from right now. Your title says you can't format but I didn't see you asking anything about that.

Thanks so much clipper! I'm by no means a hardware guy and it's been a year since i've researched anything regarding this machine... i was hoping it would be as simple as just plugging it in, but i always want to double check incase there is something obvious i'm missing

 

[coolqf]

For convenience (if you want) you can put the HDD in an external casing and connect it to your computer via USB.

 

[cotfessi]

UGH!! OK... I added the drive and when my machine booted, it saw the two partitions on the drive and mounted them. Moving around the drive is strange - it's much slower to load the contents of a file and once the contents are loaded, I can't operate on them... videos won't play. I've decided I just want the damn thing to work... most of the files I've already backed up. Now i just want the thing to work!

When I go to disk utility I want to repartition the drive to be just one partition but for some reason I can't. I get the attached error. I get the same error if i try to erase a particular partition as well...

please help!!

 

[cotfessi]

update:

went to a partition of the drive in disk utility and clicked verify, was told to repair, and then it came back with the attached error

 

[clipper99]

Boot from a Unibeast USB and instead of installing OSX run Disk Utility and do the repairs from there.

 

[cotfessi]

next update:

I was able to finally unmount using the command line:

17 $ diskutil unmountDisk force /Volumes/cotfessi
Forced unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful

went to diskutility and tried to partition the drive... and i get the attached error:

 

[cotfessi]

Boot from a Unibeast USB and instead of installing OSX run Disk Utility and do the repairs from there.

CLIPPER: what is the difference with diskutility at the unibeast level?

 

[clipper99]

There are situations where OSX (Windows too) cannot perform certain types of low-level repairs to a drive from inside the OS itself. This looks like one of those situations to me. Try the repair as I've said and let us know how you make out.