Cloning encrypted drive

[Faloude]

So there are three MacBooks in this story.

• A waterdamage perished macbook air 2015
• A macbook air 2013 serves to replace the faulty one
• My macbook pro 2015 running Catalina

I want to clone my 2015 Air SSD to my 2013 Air SSD. This is my game plan

• Plug my 2015 Air SSD into my Pro via USB using a freakishly expensive adapter
• Use disk utility on my Pro to create an image from 2015 Air SSD
• Reboot my Pro into recovery mode -> to Disk Utility
• Open the 2015 Air image, mount it and unlock it
• Hook up the 2013 Air SSD to my Pro via USB and erase it to APFS Encrypted
• Restore 2013 SSD from 2015 SSD image file which is mounted

Disk utility starts to Replicate but eventually errors out to OS Status 49244 (see screenshot). Any ideas?

Additional detail: Both SSD's are the same size (128 GB) but the 2015 one is a Samsung whereas the 2013 one is a SanDisk.

 

[junkw]

why not just put the samsung into the 2013 and reboot?

 

[Faloude]

why not just put the samsung into the 2013 and reboot?

Ah yes forgot to mention in opening post. I get a circle with a diagonal strip through it (forbidden sign) when I try that. I think the 2015 SSD is incompatible with 2013 model but I'm not sure!

 

[Weaselboy]

DU restore has this odd quirk where the target drive needs to be a the same or larger size than the source, no matter how much or little data is on the source. So try using DU to shrink the source volume a little to make it smaller than the target volume, then try again.

Also do not format the new target to encrypted. Just format to APFS then once you are booted to that new system turn on FileVault to setup encryption properly.

 

[flaubert]

Here is the Apple support article on resizing a disk image:

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/resize-a-disk-image-dskuc033a48f/mac

 

[Faloude]

Another day, another error message

Firstly, I can't shrink (ie: split partitions) before virtually mounting the drive partition in contrary to what the Apple article instructs.

After mounting I'm able to split the partition into two (shrinking the big one) but it errors out to [see screenshot].

Edit: Also previously I've made an image file from the source drive in read-only format and wasn't able to recover it to the destination drive. I've retried this using a read/write format, resulting in the same error unfortunately.

 

[junkw]

Ah yes forgot to mention in opening post. I get a circle with a diagonal strip through it (forbidden sign) when I try that. I think the 2015 SSD is incompatible with 2013 model but I'm not sure!

According to Apple it means you have to upgrade the OS
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204156

What if you reinstall (without erasing) using those instructions:
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT204904

 

[Faloude]

According to Apple it means you have to upgrade the OS
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204156

That's would be strange. OS on the SSD is Catalina and the 2013 MBAir supports it.

What if you reinstall (without erasing) using those instructions:
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT204904

That could be a possibility although not my preferred way to go.. I'd prefer to fix this without altering data on that drive.