Mystified how to move your Hackintosh to a shiny, new, big-ass hard disk?   Let me show you the light my friend – No terminal commands required!

Note that this tutorial does not address booting from MBR or dual booting Windows on the SAME hard disk.  I run Windows in a dual boot configuration, but I do it from an additional/physically separate hard drive.

1.  Connect your new hard disk to your Hackintosh via USB (enclosure) or directly via SATA.

2.  Load “Disk Utility” from Utilities on your Hackintosh and Partition your new Hard Drive.  I recommend creating a single partition formatted with “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.  Make sure “GUID Partition Table” is selected in “Options”.

3.  Clone your disk: Download and Install SuperDuper.  Run SuperDuper, selecting your source and destination drives.  Then hit “Copy Now”.  In my example below “Time Machine” would be the new, destination hard disk and “1TB” being the source disk.  The copy process will take a while.

4.  YOU ARE NOT DONE YET!  Now you must make the new disk bootable.

Option 1: Run MultiBeast, point it to your the new disk from step 3 (in the example below that is “OSX-SSD”) and select the install for Chimera bootloader.

-OR-

Option 2: Download and Run the Chameleon RC2 Packaged Installer and point it to your new disk during the install process.  In this example, we’d be making the “Time Machine” disk bootable.

Do you need or want a NEWER Chameleon release? Do this: Run step 4.  Then: Download the desired Chameleon release and replace the “boot” file in the root of your new drive (i.e. RC4 which has no packaged GUI installer).

5.  Remove your old hard disk and replace with the new disk.  Boot up and you should be good to go!  

NOTE: If you are using a USB enclosure for cloning, DO NOT TRY to boot your new installation from the USB drive.  IT WILL MOST LIKELY NOT WORK and you will get a “boot 1: error” in Chameleon!  You are not crazy and your clone is NOT BROKEN.  Simply remove the hard disk from the enclosure placing it directly connected to your system via SATA.

I recommend leaving your original “source” disk untouched and in a safe location for a week (just in case your new hard disk isn’t reliable or breaks, you can swap in your old disk).