Partitioning issue after HDD to SSD sector copy and swap in Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite)

Question

Recently decided to replace my nearly full 500GB hard disk drive with a 1TB SSD to breathe some new life into my mid-2010 MacBook Pro.

I used a “toaster”-style drive cloner (Dyconn Dubbler) to do a sector-by-sector duplication of the drive. Everything went smoothly but when I booted up from the new drive, I seem to only have around 500 GB of total space, almost all of it full.

I fooled around with the partitions a little in disk utility, hoping I could maybe create and delete one, but haven’t had any luck. Thought I would be able to drag the partition size but that doesn’t seem to be an option.

Here is what I see in disk utility with the drive attached/mounted from my other machine:

Running the most recent version of Mac OS X; 10.10 (Yosemite). Feel like a dummy, missing something obvious here, any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I used a toaster-style drive cloner (Dyconn Dubbler) to do a sector by sector duplication of the drive.

That’s the problem right here. The official specs page for the Dyconn Dubbler states:

Standalone 1:1 Sector by Sector HDD Duplication (no computer needed)

The thing with these standalone copiers are is they blindly copy disk data on an extremely low-level sector-by-sector basis. Including the original drive’s partition table. So if you do a one-to-one copy of drives of the same size, they are great tools! But if you use them to copy data from a smaller drive to a larger drive, the small drive’s partition gets copied to the larger drive… And space is lost.

Typically I would recommend that upgrades like this happen on an OS level where the files themselves are synced using a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! which uses rsync to make perfect clones on a file system level. And honestly I think that might be the only way of recovering the “lost” space on the SSD especially if this is happening in Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) which uses LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to manage partitions.

That said, this answer on Ask Different seems to address your issue. My advice? Try it and see if you can expand your space with those tips. But if you get frustrated—and I assume you still have your original hard drive—then you can just boot from that, format the SSD again and then use Carbon Copy Cloner to make the actual file system level copy.

Answer 2

@Neurobear, this is a bit off topic but highly relevant if you bought a SSD that needs trim support such as the Samsung 840 Evo or any other Samsung drive for that matter. Hope it's helpful to you or some other reader. Personally I've had to buy a new drive after deciding on Yosemite given my penchant for security and a preference for headaches free SSDs.

3rd party SSDs for the most part DO NOT have trim support in Yosemite without kext signing security tradeoffs. Apple changes kext signing in OS X 10.10 such that kext singing must be disabled to use applications like Trim Enabler for trim support. So, for Yosemite, reduced security or an OWC SSD with Sandforce are only choices as of now.

Yosemite kills third-party SSD support. Trim kext is altered in Yosemite. This is not relevant if you're using an Apple installed SSD or Sandforce SSD such as OWC's. If you're using a DIY SSD, Trim support is tricky in Yosemite because of recent modifications to kext security management that affects Trim support. More about Trim Enabler for Mac.

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About Trim in Yosemite In OS X 10.10 (Yosemite),

Apple has introduced a new security requirement called kext signing. (A kext is a kernel extension, or a driver, in Mac OS X)

Kext signing basically works by checking if all the drivers in the system are unaltered by a third party, or approved by Apple. If they have been modified, Yosemite will no longer load the driver. This is a means of enforcing security, but also a way for Apple to control what hardware that third party developers can release OS X support for.

Since Trim Enabler works by unlocking the Trim driver for 3rd party SSD’s, this security setting prevents Trim Enabler to enable Trim on Yosemite.

To continue to use Trim Enabler and continue to get Trim for your third party SSD, you first need to disable the kext signing security setting.

It is important to note that the kext-signing setting is global, if you disable it you should be careful to only install system drivers from sources that you trust.

Another option, as some drives work without Trim enabled: ZDNet on issues with Trim in Yosemite.

Good Luck!