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kurenaiz

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 1, 2008
52
0
I'm on a macbook pro unibody late 2008.

Today, I just got my hand on the seagate momentus XT 750 GB.

I want to clone whatever I have in my current hard drive to the XT, except for the download folders, which weigh in at 460 GB.

Then, I would want to delete everything else except for the download folder, off from my old disk, in order to use it as an external storage.

If I were to do this, would it render my files in the download folder inaccessible or corrupted?

Or is there other better way of uninstalling OSX off from my old disk?
 
It would be best to just reformat it after you clone it. But you will need to copy your download folder to a safe spot before you reformat.

Yeah, I was hoping to avoid copying the 460 GB data back and forth between the 2 disks.

Is there any other ways?
 
I'm on a macbook pro unibody late 2008.

Today, I just got my hand on the seagate momentus XT 750 GB.

I want to clone whatever I have in my current hard drive to the XT, except for the download folders, which weigh in at 460 GB.

Then, I would want to delete everything else except for the download folder, off from my old disk, in order to use it as an external storage.

If I were to do this, would it render my files in the download folder inaccessible or corrupted?

Or is there other better way of uninstalling OSX off from my old disk?

This should work fine. It definitely will not corrupt the files in your Downloads folder. There will be some hidden folders that will be left on the disk, though, which could confuse the system at times I suppose. I'd recommend just using the Terminal to remove those (if you're comfortable with it) or enabling the viewing of hidden files for a while so that you can delete them.

For the record, these are the folders and files you might want to delete:
Code:
.DS_Store
.dbfseventsd
.vol
System
cores
mach_kernel
sbin
.DocumentRevisions-V100
.file
Applications
dev
net
tmp
.Spotlight-V100
.fseventsd
Library
Volumes
etc
opt
usr
.Trashes
.hotfiles.btree
Network
bin
home
private
var
I don't know how many of those would actually be critical, but I would delete them all to be safe. (That's just a list of all files, hidden and visible, from my boot drive, for the record.)

jW
 
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