How I upgraded to a higher capacity SSD in the NUC without starting over from scratch
Hey everyone, just wanted to give a quick update. I replaced the old-and-lying-around Kingston 128GB 3.0GB/sec 2.5" SATA SSD that I used to complete my original install with a more permanent Samsung 850 EVO M.2 256GB SSD. After looking around this site and others for the path of least resistance, and a bit of trial and error...here's how i did it:
- With both drives physically installed, booted into the old drive's OS.
- Using the Apple Disk Utility, initialized the new M.2 Drive, creating a partition with the recommended setting from this guide (GPT, Journaled, etc.). Shut down.
- On reboot, chose the Recovery partition on the 2.5" drive from the Clover boot menu.
- Using the Apple Disk Utility, ran a "Restore" from the old OS partition to the new one (~60GB copied in like 10 mins). Rebooted.
- On reboot, notable things:
- The BIOS did not yet recognize the new SSD in the Boot menu - that when I knew I needed to add a UEFI Partition with Clover.
- There were 2 new options in the clover boot menu - duplicates of my original Boot partition and the recovery partition.
- Booted into the old OS once again.
- Figured out which of my identically named OS partitions was on the new M.2 drive, and then renamed it in the finder.
- Installed Clover on the M.2 SSD using the default options. (this was originally a mistake; I missed the "customize" button the first time around, but I think that this through step 12 might have actually been simpler in hindsight).
- Used Clover Configurator to mount the Old EFI partition.
- Copied the entire EFI folder from the old 2.5 SATA EFI partition to the new M.2 EFI partition.
- Used Clover Configurator to rename the "Default boot volume" to the new name of the OS partition on the M.2 SSD (using the name defined in step 7 above).
- Reinstalled Clover on the M.2 SSD, ensuring that all of the options from the original guide were preserved (they were, by default). Shut down.
- On Reboot, checked BIOS to make sure that the M.2 was a boot option post-Clover, which it was. Re-ordered the boot drives to make M.2 first. Upon boot, confirmed that the boot drive was in fact the new OS partition in the MacOS. Shut down.
- Physically removed the old 2.5" SATA drive from the NUC.
- Rebooted to verify no more dependencies on the old 2.5" SATA drive. Confirmed! Noticeably faster boot time than the 2.5 SATA disk (YMMV).
Noteworthy hurdle that I cleared: During this process, I did get to a point where I had the old drive disconnected, and it appeared the machine would boot - but it kept getting hung at the end of the "boot thermometer". That's when I determined that I needed change the name of the Default Boot Volume to match the renamed drive (step 11) in the config.plist. Just in case anyone runs into that.
I am sure there's a quicker way to clone the UEFI partition along with the boot and recovery HD partitions, but I'm unaware. If not, then I hope this guide will be helpful to others that want to simply replace their boot drives!
Ammulder, thanks again for coming up with a method that includes a recovery partition for operations like this. Just because it's a Hackintosh doesn't mean we should be without basic utilities! Bravo.
