Instead, you need to either boot your Mac to another drive that contains the Mac OS, or use the Recovery HD volume to start up and run Disk Utility from. (Booting from the Recovery HD volume allows you to create a clone of your startup drive.) Since the startup drive can’t be unmounted, you can’t make a clone of the startup drive directly. Disk Utility uses a block copy method that provides for a faster copy, but it also needs to unmount all of the volumes involved in the restore process. Using Disk Utility’s restore capabilities to make a clone of your startup drive has a limitation. You’ll find instructions for preparing an image file near the end of this article. If you’re planning on restoring from an image file you need to take the additional step of scanning the image file before the restore process. Restore will work with internal or external volumes. Restore will copy the source volume or image file to the destination volume, so you’ll need a disk that contains a volume large enough to hold the data from the source volume.īoth the source and destination volumes need to be mounted on your Mac. But when it comes to the restore feature, Disk Utility hasn’t undergone many changes the biggest was the redesign of the Disk Utility interface that came about with the release of OS X El Capitan.īecause of that major change, we’re going to provide two sets of instructions for using Disk Utility’s Restore feature one for OS X Yosemite and earlier, and one for OS X El Capitan and later. (The newer version of Disk Utility has undergone a GUI overhaul.)ĭisk Utility was at version 16.0 at the time of this writing, so there have certainly been more than two versions. That makes the restore function extremely versatile, even if it’s largely overlooked in Disk Utility.

It can create a copy of any image or volume that can be mounted on your Mac. The restore function isn’t limited to creating clones of the startup drive. Provided the source for the clone was a bootable startup drive, then the destination will generally also be useable as a bootable startup drive, which is pretty darned convenient.

The advantages of cloning are many, but the one that is repeatedly mentioned in troubleshooting guides, as well as guides to installing new versions of the Mac OS, is the clone’s ability to be used as a Mac’s startup drive. We often think of this as cloning a drive, so you have an exact copy for backup or archiving purposes. Disk Utility, in all of its incarnations, has always had a restore function, a way to copy a disk volume or image file to another volume, creating an exact copy.

Mac disk utility not showing hard drive