Backing up and restoring to an extremely large harddrive

[shannonsumner]

Hello all,

My company just bought me a new iMac and I've spent the last month configuring it. I'm a Linux user so I choose to use a case-sensitive file system. They just purchase me Adobe CS4 design standard and as you know - I can't install it on my machine. My question is this - I'd love to backup my harddrive (only 62 gigs used out of a terabyte available) and reinstall leopard on as a non-case-sensitive file system and then restore my machine and have it work as before. How can I do this if I don't have the extra terabyte available? My biggest external harddrive is 160 gig? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Shannon Sumner

 

[brand]

Archive and install.

 

[Makosuke]

Archive and Install won't do any good, since a full reformat is required to change from case-sensitive to -insensitive filesystem on the drive; Archive and Install just reinstalls the OS.

However, if you only have 62GB on the drive, all you need is an external with at least that much capacity.

Download Carbon Copy Cloner and use it to clone the internal drive to an external. Then boot from another drive or the clone you just made, wipe your 1TB internal and reformat as case-insensitive, and finally use CCC to re-clone back to the internal drive.

You should be good to go at that point. I've done something similar dozens of times. To check, though, do you have Linux installed on the same 1TB drive, or did you just do case-sensitive because you're used to it? If you have Linux installed I'm not positive whether CCC will keep it bootable.

 

[shannonsumner]

Hello all,

I was considering creating a partition on my harddirve and backing up to the partition and then testing if I can boot to that partition. If I can and everything works OK - I'll delete the main partition and expand the new partition to fill all the space. Is this idea feasible?

Let me know,

Shannon