How do I create an external bootable drive?

elgrecomac said:

I use timemachine and as Lacie 1Tb drive to back up my MBP but I would like to have an external BOOTABLE drive. So the question, how can I 'clone' my existing internal hard drive onto a a external LaCie Rugged Extreme so that I can boot off of it if need be

Thanks!

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Use SuperDuper!. The fully Leopard compatible version looks like it will release tomorrow. You can also use the built in Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) to do the job, but the paid-for SuperDuper! version will do incremental updates to the clone, and is schedulable

The program of choice is Carbon Copy Cloner. It's donation ware, so give the guy a few bucks. There is also Superduper commercial ware, Leopard ready yet anyone?

My method of cloning is like this.

New drive:

1: Launch Apple's Disk Utility and Erase with Zero option the new drive. Only have to do it once for a drive. It does take some time though but worth it. It checks the drive for bad sectors by writing 0's to every bit on the drive. If it finds a bad bit in a sector it will map off that sector from never being written to again. This insures a quality writes and reliable data from bit corruption. Use a Firewire 800 connection for the fastest speed, or next Firewire 400, or last USB. Hook up a laptop to power supply.

2: While in Disk Utility, check the drive your cloning (if you get errors you'll have to c boot from a OS install disk and run Disk Utility on the boot drive that way to repair it) Repair Permissions in Disk Utility.

3: Quit all other programs and users, log into a admin account, turn off sleep/screen saver and run Carbon Copy Cloner. It's pretty easy from there. Clone the whole drive from point A to point B, disappear for a few minutes/hours or so depending on the size and data on your drive.

4: When it's done. Hold "c" and boot while the clone is hooked up and click the cloned drive when the option appears on the screen. Repair permissions in Disk Utility (you'll see some corrections) and your all set.

5: Boot the original and repair permissions on that drive as well. (you don't need to hold the "c" to boot the original)

Cloning beats the pants off of TimeMachine, as that drive is not bootable. Hardware failure occurs quite a bit, especially with the lesser quality Seagate drives Apple uses. Cloning copies everything, including copy protection schemes for software. (but may only work on one computer) I always keep a couple of staggered clones, Panther, Tiger etc so I can evaluate OS performance speeds.

For a comparison of SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner, check out this thread and this test. Carbon Copy Cloner is rated as 'Not Recommended' and SuperDuper is rated as 'Highly Recommended' (just checked the review date and it's a pretty old review). Like I said earlier, the Leopard ready SuperDuper is supposed to release tomorrow

blodwyn said:

For a comparison of SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner, check out this thread and this test. Carbon Copy Cloner is rated as 'Not Recommended' and SuperDuper is rated as 'Highly Recommended' (just checked the review date and it's a pretty old review). Like I said earlier, the Leopard ready SuperDuper is supposed to release tomorrow

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The publisher of that site only bases those opinions upon saving metadata, nothing else. Metadata exactness matters only to a few and effects virtually nobody.

"Even though it should already be pretty obvious, an additional word or two: my recommendation is based solely on the metadata preservation capabilities (no other features are judged), and on my perspective that a backup tool should preserve every bit of metadata of every file."

If you value privacy and security, in my opinion SuperDuper's covert connection to the internet (to check for updates, log connections; ip addresses, computer type etc.) combined with a admin password is not a good combination. I happen to like SuperDuper very much, except for this issue.

I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner because developer has a big heart for education, the software was first and still free and it doesn't act covertly. Cloning is such a necessary for everyone because OS X lost the ability to simply copy a OS System folder from one disk to another via the Finder like OS 9 did.

If it wasn't for developers like that, cloning would be restricted to only those who could pay big bucks for a commercial version. The poor/starving student would be shut out of a valuable resource and tool to have a alternate boot-able backup.

So if you value the effect of donation ware in keeping software prices reasonable for everyone, send in a few bucks to them every once in awhile.