So, my Mac book pro hard drive I think is starting to fail – running very slow.

It’s a 500gb drive. So bought a new 1tb drive, used superdooper to clone it, installed the new one

But,
It won’t boot off the new drive
And the new drive looks like it’s full (I can boot off the old drive and when I look in finder the new one only seems to have 46gb free?)

Any tips on what I’ve done wrong or how to get it working? Step by step instructions helpful! I’m at a loss as to what I’ve done wrong

New drive looking like it’s full suggests there’s only one partition on it, sized at 500gb. Superduper may have done this when copying the old drive, it didn’t expand the partition.

Regarding not booting, I had this with an older (2007) Macbook Pro. Turned out that the version of OS-X I had, (Lion 7.0) didn’t have drivers for the new HD. I needed OS-X 7.2. Apple store kindly installed that for me, I restored from Time Machine, and off we went.

It may be useful to go back to an empty 1TB drive, use disc utility to erase and partition it, do a minimum 3 pass erase which is going to take hours but will ensure there is no carry over from the faulty install. Ensure that you select the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) setting and in the options select GUID partition table, when you get to partitioning time.

Sounds like your clone may not have been set right. There should be an option for creating a bootable clone somewhere in the preferences, not all clones are. Super duper is not the cloning programme I use so you’ll need to read the manual to see what is required.

From bens comment above it should be possible to re-size the partition in disk utility without wiping the data. It’s a drag the slider job and hit apply.

Stupid question but what does partition mean?

I feel your pain OP – I’ve been through a similar thing this week. I went from a 500Gb drive to a 250Gb SSD, but I had a cleanup first and only had ~100Gb to transfer. The was no way timemachine was going to let me fit my files on a smaller drive, even though I’d done a single, clean backup of my 100Gb of files and there shouldn’t have been anything more to store.

What worked most easily in the end was:
1. backup the old drive onto timemachine
2. install the new drive
3. put a fresh copy of the OS on new drive using the original install CD
4. upgrade to yosemite
5. put files back on with timemachine

Not what I had originally intended to do, but didn’t require too much effort.

I did this last year to my MB and couldn’t get SuperDooper to work satisfactorily and ended up doing a clean install and recover files via time machine. I don’t have a lot of software so no issues there, however I did have a copy of MS Office which needed the listen every code to work on the new drive, which I’d lost so I only lost MSOffice. But everything else was as it was before.

Well, wiped the new drive and starting a fresh install using the original cd. Here’s hoping

A partition is a section on the disc defined by you, they can be of any size and any number, it’s a good idea not to have the one with the OS installed too small or the Mac will bog down due to swapping things in and out of virtual memory.
Good luck with the re-install. Should be all done by tomorrow afternoon!