Mystified how to move your Hackintosh to a shiny, new, big-ass hard disk?   Let me show you the light my friend – No terminal commands required!

Note that this tutorial does not address booting from MBR or dual booting Windows on the SAME hard disk.  I run Windows in a dual boot configuration, but I do it from an additional/physically separate hard drive.

1.  Connect your new hard disk to your Hackintosh via USB (enclosure) or directly via SATA.

2.  Load “Disk Utility” from Utilities on your Hackintosh and Partition your new Hard Drive.  I recommend creating a single partition formatted with “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.  Make sure “GUID Partition Table” is selected in “Options”.

3.  Clone your disk: Download and Install SuperDuper.  Run SuperDuper, selecting your source and destination drives.  Then hit “Copy Now”.  In my example below “Time Machine” would be the new, destination hard disk and “1TB” being the source disk.  The copy process will take a while.

4.  YOU ARE NOT DONE YET!  Now you must make the new disk bootable.  Download and Run the Chameleon RC2 Packaged Installer and point it to your new disk during the install process.  In this example, we’d be making the “Time Machine” disk bootable.  Requires NO terminal commands: SWEET!

Do you need or want a NEWER Chameleon release? Do this: Run step 4.  Then: Download the desired Chameleon release and replace the “boot” file in the root of your new drive (i.e. RC4 which has no packaged GUI installer).

5.  Remove your old hard disk and replace with the new disk.  Boot up and you should be good to go!  

NOTE: If you are using a USB enclosure for cloning, DO NOT TRY to boot your new installation from the USB drive.  IT WILL MOST LIKELY NOT WORK and you will get a “boot 1: error” in Chameleon!  You are not crazy and your clone is NOT BROKEN.  Simply remove the hard disk from the enclosure placing it directly connected to your system via SATA.

I recommend leaving your original “source” disk untouched and in a safe location for a week (just in case your new hard disk isn’t reliable or breaks, you can swap in your old disk).

I had a problem where when I’d be browsing in FireFox with iTunes playing in the background on my MSI Wind u100 Hackintosh. When I was viewing a page with many Flash objects, or moving quickly throughout a page in FireFox iTunes would start stuttering on playback.

Note that I’m using the MSIWindosx86.iso image with no OS X system updates (still on 10.5.4) but all program updates applied. Also I am currently overclocked by 8% with 1 GB of RAM.  I tend to think the stutter may be caused by excessive disk swapping so I’m curious if my RAM upgrade will completely eliminate the issue.

I eliminated most the stutter by simply unchecking the “Sound Enhancer” in the Playback section of iTunes Preferences.  This setting is on by default.  Oddly I still get random stutter, but it’s much less now.

Of course you can go the route of updating your Wind and dealing with broken devices, etc. But I’m happy with my 10.5.4 Wind with all the various pieces of hardware functional.