How to clone my HHD to SSD on my mid-2009 Macbook Pro I'm trying to clone my 680GB HDD to a new 500GB SSD, trying EaseUS and Carbon Copy Cloner. The goal is to replace my HDD with the SSD, so I need to boot from it. There's only about 100GB of used disk space on my HDD so I figured it's doable to clone, unless it's literally trying to copy every sector, empty or not, in which case my SSD is too small.
Any thoughts on how to do this? Would using the Disk Utility be another option? I've read up on Time Machine, or Restore option in Disk Utility, but it's hard to find a clear answer and so far what I've tried hasn't worked. I managed to copy the contents over to the SSD but it won't boot up from it. And when I tried reassigning the startup disk to my SSD, it still didn't boot from it. Not sure what else to try. Thanks in advance.
I wouldn't recommend having the boot drive mounted to do a proper clone. If you have an external drive (preferably firewire 800 for that model, but USB 2 will also work), install a current versions of macOS onto it. Boot to that drive by restarting and holding down the Option key at boot, and you can select the external bootable drive. Now that you are booted to your external, install your clone software of choice, in your case Carbon Copy Cloner (I personally like SuperDuper! but that is me). Once you have the software installed, start cloning the boot disk to the new SSD.
As a side note, make sure that you partition your new SSD before you start the process. That way you don't run into an error because it is FAT32 partitioned and not GUID.