Move complete Lion installation to another physical drive

is there a way to completely move my OSX Lion to my new SSD without reinstalling? I came from Windows and Linux to OSX and i thought maybe it is possible to simply change the bootloader config after copying all system files to the SSD like in GRUB?

Solution 1:

I believe that simply copying the files manually won't be enough. I'd use SuperDuper for getting a "true" clone of the old drive.

Solution 2:

Doing a copy will not make the drive bootable. There are all kinds of hidden files and "blessing" that needs to be done to make it bootable. For a really good description, see What makes a volume bootable? And yes, programs like Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! make this task very easy. Additionally, programs like those will let you select and choose what files and folders you do not want to copy to the SSD, if you are in a situation where you need to cut down on things to fit everything on the SSD.

Additionally, you can use the built-in Disk Utility program if your current disk is smaller than the new SSD. Using the Restore tab. Select your old volume as the source and select the new SSD as the destination, and that should work as well, but the above choices are the best way to proceed, since they are more polished for the task.

Also, there is "One More Thing" and it's kind of important. Since this is Mac OS X Lion we are talking about. To truly get a complete Lion installation copied over to the SSD, we should account for the hidden lion recovery partition. I can't say for sure, but I think if you use CCC or SD! and pick the disk aka "Macintosh HD" and say copy that to disk "mySDD", it's going to miss the lion recovery partition. Which you will probably want to have around too for when things go wrong.