Week of Tips [Leopard] - Convert Drive Type from APM to GUID

Nov/14/2007 23:22 Filed in: Tips & Tricks

Some people are trying to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard and are finding out that they have an Apple Partition Map (APM) hard drive and Leopard won't install on a non GUID partitioned hard drive. A co-worker of mine ran into this problem, and he used this exact same approach as recently outlined on MacOSXhints with great success.

harddrive

1. Formatting your external: Plug in your external drive and back up anything that's already on it. Go to Disk Utility, select your FireWire drive and in the right side, click on the Partition tab. Click on the Options... button and select GUID as your Partition Type. Lastly, click on the Partition button to format/partition your external drive as GUID. Approx time: Less than five minutes.

2. Copying your data: Once it's formatted, run SuperDuper. For your source in the left dropdown, select your original, internal hard drive. For the destination in the right dropdown, select your external drive. For the "using" dropdown, select Backup - all files. Click on the Options button, and then in the During Copy dropdown, select the first option that says Erase, then copy files. Press OK to close the options window, then click Copy Now. Approx time: about 100 seconds for every GB.

3. Boot off your external drive: Restart your computer and hold down the Option key. A volume select menu should come up within seconds. Click the arrow under your external drive to boot from it.

4. Re-partition your original drive: Once you're booted into OSX again off your external drive, open up Disk Utility and select your original internal hard drive. Click on the Partition tab on the right side, and then click Options and select GUID. Click the Partition button to erase/repartition your original hard drive as GUID. Approximate Time: Less than five minutes.

5. Re-copy your data back to your original drive: Open Superduper again. Two warning windows may pop up about Volumes not being found, but just click Cancel and ignore them. In the left Copy pulldown, select your external drive. In the right Copy pulldown, select your original internal drive. Under using, select Backup - all files. Click on the Options button, and then in the During Copy dropdown, select the first option that says Erase, then copy files. Press OK to close the options window, then click Copy Now. Approx time: about 100 seconds for every GB.

6. Reboot and enjoy! Whew! So after all this work, you now have a GUID-partitioned internal hard drive that is essentially untouched from before, but now with a proper partition type than can be upgraded to Leopard or have bootcamp installed.