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Why Hard Drive Cloning via Disk Utility Keeps Failing? Help!

I am trying to clone my Passport external hard drive to a new Easy Store hard drive by using Disk Utility. I keep getting an error/fail message. My Passport external hard drive has already been formatted to MacOS Extended (Journaled) and partitioned, a portion for files, photos, etc. I also did this for my EasyStore external hard drive (the destination for the cloned files). I don't want to copy each file to my EasyStore hard drive. How do I fix this error? Please help!

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Wilsey Young

Wilsey Young

Answered on Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Some factors may cause the error and fail messages while you cloning a hard drive via Disk Utility:

  • There's drive manufacturer's software on the drive
  • The format of the source disk and target disk is not the same
  • The target disk doesn't have a larger capacity than the source disk

I recommend iBoysoft DiskGeeker, a professional disk management tool, for cloning a hard drive to another, you can free download this software to complete the hard drive cloning.

 Download

iBoysoft DiskGeeker

Rating:4.8

     

 Simple steps to clone your external hard drive to another:

 Note: Make a backup of your target disk as the clone will overwrite the data on it. 

  1. Connect your Passport external hard drive and Easy Store hard drive to your Mac and launch iBoysoft DiskGeeker.
  2. Select the source disk (Passport external hard drive) at the left sidebar of the iBoysoft DiskGeeker window.
  3. Click "Clone" from the right toolbar.
  4. Choose a destination drive(Easy Store hard drive) from the pop-up list and click startClone. 

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