How to install larger hard drives and upgrade to Leopard?

Hey there.

All 4 hard drives on my Mac Pro are reaching capacity.

Since I'm planning to upgrade to Leopard, I thought that I'd at least swap the boot drive (250GB) for a much larger one.

I need to ensure that the integrity of the data on the other drives is intact, particularly my scratch array (2 x 300GB striped).

I do not wish to reinstall everything from scratch. I've simply too much software and 3rd party plugins that would be a bear to reinstall.

What I'd like to do is clone the current primary drive to an external one (say, 1 TB), then swap the boot drive with a 750GB one or better. After that, I'd like to be able to restore it as is by copying from the boot drive to the new internal. Lastly, I'd like to do an archive and install with Tiger.

After that, I can copy data over to the external and swap the other drives as needed.

Since I've never upgraded a Mac before, can someone please advise if this method is sound and how best I can go about doing it? I've yet to purchase any software or drives (either external or internal), so feel free to chime in with drive recommendations as well.

aross99 said:

I would use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your drive to an external drive, then swap out your boot drive. Boot off the external drive, and use CCC to copy it back.

It will take a while, but it works. If you can get the new drive installed internally, you can copy it that way and then swap them out - that will be alot quicker.

You can get an external case, or special cable adapter to let you use your new drive as the external one. OWC (www.macsales.com) has great deals on these.

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