USB drive unmounting by itself during HD cloning

[guedzilla]

Hello everyone.
I recently decided to upgrade my mid-2012 Macbook Pro 13", by adding more RAM (4GB to 16GB) and by swapping the old 500GB HDD with a 960GB SSD.
I'm running OSX 10.11 El Capitan, because it's the last version that has a compatible driver for my discontinued audio card (I use the macbook mostly for music production).
The RAM swap had no issues, but I couldn't make the drive cloning work. I'd like to make an exact copy of the HDD to the SSD, instead of a fresh install, because there are numerous plugins and apps already installed, it would be a pain to track them all down again.

I searched the internet and followed the instructions I found, booted up in recovery mode, and using the disk utility I formatted the SSD using OSX journaled format, and chose "restore" to copy the HDD to the SSD. After a few minutes the operation was interrupted, and I got the error "s/bin/newfs-hfs failed with error 256."

I also tried using the 3rd-party program Carbon Copy Cloner, but got the same issues... the cloning process would go on to copy about 10GB (sometimes a bit less) and then the USB drive disconnects by itself and the process is interrupted.

I tried this both with the SSD inside an USB enclosure and the HDD installed inside the Macbook, and the other way around, and also tried both USB ports. And I also ran the disk utility's first aid on both drives and they're both OK.

Any insights?

 

[TonyAguila]

Hello everyone.
I recently decided to upgrade my mid-2012 Macbook Pro 13", by adding more RAM (4GB to 16GB) and by swapping the old 500GB HDD with a 960GB SSD.
I'm running OSX 10.11 El Capitan, because it's the last version that has a compatible driver for my discontinued audio card (I use the macbook mostly for music production).
The RAM swap had no issues, but I couldn't make the drive cloning work. I'd like to make an exact copy of the HDD to the SSD, instead of a fresh install, because there are numerous plugins and apps already installed, it would be a pain to track them all down again.

I searched the internet and followed the instructions I found, booted up in recovery mode, and using the disk utility I formatted the SSD using OSX journaled format, and chose "restore" to copy the HDD to the SSD. After a few minutes the operation was interrupted, and I got the error "s/bin/newfs-hfs failed with error 256."

I also tried using the 3rd-party program Carbon Copy Cloner, but got the same issues... the cloning process would go on to copy about 10GB (sometimes a bit less) and then the USB drive disconnects by itself and the process is interrupted.

I tried this both with the SSD inside an USB enclosure and the HDD installed inside the Macbook, and the other way around, and also tried both USB ports. And I also ran the disk utility's first aid on both drives and they're both OK.

Any insights?

Try doing a fresh installation of El Capitan on the SSD and then performing the migration from the HD to the fresh installation on the SSD. Migration is part of the installation, so make sure that the HD is also connected to the Mac during the installation.

 

[guedzilla]

Hello, thanks for your answer.

I tried copying the whole HD to the SSD a few more times, without success... tried using Clonezilla to make a copy, but that also didn't work. I tried another SSD, in case it was a physical error, but got the same issues.

I tried installing El Capitan in all ways I could think of (downloaded the installer several times, run it directly from the installer, USB installer, internet recovery) but it didn't work.
I tried installing Lion from the original recovery, also didn't work.
I tried throwing my computer against the wall
So, what did work was, making an USB installer for Mavericks (I had the installer saved, still), following this guide: https://www.lifewire.com/create-bootable-usb-flash-drive-os-x-mavericks-2260351 , which was a lot of work.

Next up, I'll try to update it to El Capitan through the app store, and then I'll get to the migration tool

 

[Rodananne]

In the future might like to try Instal Disk Creator free from https://macdaddy.io/?utm_source=app_idc it's a simple two step process to create a bootable installer if you have the macOS Installer from the App Store already.
Do ensure you erase the internal HD at the media level first using Disk Utility on the Bootable Installer created, then just follow the prompts. The result is a "Clean Instal" of your selected macOS if that's what you want.
The installer being bootable is a handy tool for repairs which I usually keep for emergencies.