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Post-Install Migration: Mac HD to Hackintosh SSD + HD

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pisomojado

pisomojado

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Jan 9, 2013
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Motherboard
Gigabyte Z390 Designare
CPU
i7-9700K
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RX 580
Hi,

The lifehacker and nofilmschool guides got me a 10.8.2 system up and running. Great!

Now how do I migrate all my stuff from my old mac? I have a nearly full 670 GB hard drive and no Time Machine backup. My Hackintosh has the 10.8.2 system on a 120 GB SSD and a blank 3TB HD. I tried using Migration Assistant, but it didn't understand that I have two hard drives: one for apps and one for data. Then I started googling... Are there any clear guides out there? What I've found so far indicates that treacherous waters lay ahead and now I'm paralyzed with trepidation.
 
pisomojado said:
Hi,

The lifehacker and nofilmschool guides got me a 10.8.2 system up and running. Great!

Now how do I migrate all my stuff from my old mac? I have a nearly full 670 GB hard drive and no Time Machine backup. My Hackintosh has the 10.8.2 system on a 120 GB SSD and a blank 3TB HD. I tried using Migration Assistant, but it didn't understand that I have two hard drives: one for apps and one for data. Then I started googling... Are there any clear guides out there? What I've found so far indicates that treacherous waters lay ahead and now I'm paralyzed with trepidation.
Click to expand...

You could use disk utility to copy the drive to the new blank one (that is if you hook the old drive into your new system if possible).
 
All three drives are now inside my hackintosh tower, connected via sata. Now can I just drag and drop apps from my old hard drive onto the ssd? What about user profiles and preferences? I'm under the impression that a whole lot of complicated things are going on behind the scenes in hidden files and folders I know nothing about. Is it simpler than I imagine?
 
I wouldn't recommend using Migration Assistant - see my post a couple of days ago on what happened when I tried to!

http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-h...stant-assisting-kernel-panic-little-else.html

I've been dragging apps across from my old Snow Leopard installation onto my new SSD with Mountain Lion. Some apps are self-contained, some apps have .plist files (found in your Library > Preferences folder), and some have different methods altogether. It really is a case of dragging across each app, opening it and seeing if any settings have made the transition. Some apps have more .plists in Preferences than others. Firefox, for example, stores all your user data in Library > Application Support, and all you need to do is copy the Firefox folder inside that to the same folder on your new drive before you launch the app.

Before you go any further I'd recommend partitioning out 120GB on your 3TB drive and making a complete backup of your working installation.
 
Ok, Geekroik, I'm making slow, steady progress doing things your way. The glacial piecemeal way. I partitioned 120GB and used Carbon Copy Cloner as you suggested as well.

For anyone else in my same boat who stumbles onto this thread, I found Matt Gemmell's blog entry, "Using OS X with and SSD plus HDD setup", very useful. I also learned that in Mountain Lion the Library folder in the Home directory is hidden. To make it visible, this terminal command worked for me:

sudo chflags nohidden ~/Library

I found it in the discussions.apple.com thread titled "Make User Library Visible in Mountain Lion"

Also, messing with these files will make your sidebar look very dull. To fix that I found that I needed to install the application "EasySIMBL" and, in conjunction, the plugin "ColorfulSidebar". They go together. Just google it! For me, the results were excellent and instantaneous. YMMV

My big question now is, is there a way to put the Desktop folder on the HDD? With all the churn of files a Desktop usually gets, it seems like something you'd naturally want off your SSD, right?​
 
Yeah, I should have mentioned making your Library visible but you beat me to it ;)

As for the Desktop issue, I think the closest you'll be able to get to that is some kind of automated script that cleans up your desktop files on a daily or weekly basis by moving them to another (off-SSD) folder. Of course, I might well be wrong.
 
pisomojado said:

My big question now is, is there a way to put the Desktop folder on the HDD? With all the churn of files a Desktop usually gets, it seems like something you'd naturally want off your SSD, right?​
Click to expand...

It seems to me, in my old UNIX days, that moving the user's home folder onto a non-boot drive can be done with symbolic links but it is fraught with danger. I think a better way would be to use an applescript to just move the contents on the fly. (Like geekroick said.)

As far as moving apps from one drive to another... The Migration Asst (as most utilities do) seem to assume that the destination drive will be BIGGER than the source drive. The move to a smaller (i.e. SSD) drive seems to confuse all of them. I have taken the trouble to reinstall only the apps that I actually used in the last twelve months and that way my system boots much cleaner and more reliably.

But I have also had to move apps where I have installed lots of other supporting files (think Logic with thousands of third party audio loops and plugins - Logic Version 8 DOES run on Mountain Lion BTW) so to move those required a lot of digging through both Library folders to find all those pesky add-ons. What I would do is try to run the application and if an error occurred I would note the error message and locate the missing data from the old drive..... I know it is time consuming but it's better that reinstalling all those pesky files individually even if I could remember them all!
 
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White Shadow
GA-Z77X-UP5-TH |  i7 3770K |  GTX 970 ACX 2.0
White Shadow II
ROG MAXIMUS IX HERO |  i7 7700K |  GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3
I didn't move my home folder, but I did move my desktop folder according to the Matt Gemmell method. It works with no problems!

So after two solid days of my wife asking what I'm doing with all my time...

SOLVED
 
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