Question: I am about to upgrade the hard disk of my MacBook. (From 60GB to 320GB, which I know is below the limit of 500GB).

I was both able to install an OS X on the new drive and also to transfer the old hard disks partition to the new one with a [sysresccd](http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page) (linux live disk) and `dd` (`dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda`, so entire disk). So it's not a problem of hardware, limitations or restrictions.

So, after having transferred the 60 GB-disk to the new one, every partition manager would show me that there is about 260GB left on the disk, but none would allow me to resize the partition.

The `Disk Utility` on the OS X installation cd allowes to resize, but also erases the data. I tried to copy (`dd`) the old partition into the new, bigger one (`dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/sda2`), but then the system would refuse to boot.

What I have not yet tried is creating manually a partition, then copying all the contents (with hfsplus-support on the linux live disk), because I suppose this partition would not boot either.

Is there a way to either resize the partition after having copied the entire disk, or to render the manually resized partition bootable ?

Answer: 
Just cleanly partition the new disk to any size you like and copy the data over with [Carbon Copy Cloner.](http://www.bombich.com/) It will be bootable and have the size you want. 

You can do that on a running system, and don't need any live cd's or anything, just an usb or firewire interface for the new/second harddisk.
I think there is a GUI way of doing this with Disk Utility but I can't remember off the top of my head. Anyway you should be able to resize a hfs+ volume nondestructively from the command line. The article is kind of old but the syntax haven't changed so it should still be the same. Standard warning like you should have a backup and don't try to resize the current boot drive but boot off CD or backup drive applies. You may also want to do sync and reboot right after resize as I don't know how much to trust finder to pickup the change right away.

<http://www.macworld.com/article/55274/2007/02/marchgeekfactor.html>