[Nassifer]

Hello, I have an older PC laptop and it has a ver large HDD, 640 GB's and my MacBook only has 250 GB's so I talked to the guy at apple store he told me to proble to use, here is the steps I took please help me if I am wrong.

1-boot with cmmd-r
2-goto disk utility
3-erase PC hdd
4-partition to 1
5-restore choose my existing 250gb to use in source choose new usb 650 gb as destination.

click restore

then I get an error could not validate source, error 254

Then it stops.

Please help really want to use the HDD

[cgc]

So the only thing not working is restoring your 250GB HDD data to the new 640GB HDD? Try Carbon Copy Cloner instead of DiskUtility though either should work fine.

[Spheric Harlot]

You're trying to copy to a disk that has been partitioned to be bootable for Windows.

OS X requires a different partition map - merely formatting the disk is not enough.

In Disk Utility, hit the "Partition" tab, change the partitioning scheme, and click on "Options". To be bootable, and intel Mac boot disk must be partitioned using the GUID scheme.

[Nassifer]

I just tried that Spheric Harlot and got "Could not validate source - error 254" I used the 1 partition option of GUID and still got the error, I will now try Carbon Copy.

thanks
SH

[shifuimam]

Have you had any issues with the original smaller hard drive? That error could indicate a failure. Before trying anything else, if I were you I would verify that the hard drive isn't failing.

[Nassifer]

I have had hard drive tested, it was fine. I have had success with carbon copy, now I have a great laptop with a BIG hdd, come to find out that one of my memory sticks was bad I had 6gb memory 1 4gb and 1 gb memory the 4gb was bad so now I am back to 4 gb (2 2gb sticks).

Thansk for all help people

[shifuimam]

FYI - unless the RAM came from another laptop's stock memory (Apple or otherwise), it has a lifetime warranty. RMA it with the RAM manufacturer for a replacement so you can get back to 6GB.