Booting from external HD

I know that doing a straight drag/drop never worked for me. The only thing I could think of is to create a disk image of the drive via Disk Utility. I do not know if that would work for sure (can someone confirm for me?) but in theory it would.

 

There are lots of threads here on how to replace hard drives and image your old drive over - e.g. in the past week:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=636625
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=642668
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=641931

 

1. hold the "option key" while booting your mac and you are presented a boot disk selection. Choose the external hdd, you just made a bootable clone with SuperDuper.
2. partition it to your liking and format it with one partition at least the size or bigger, than your cloned partition, you want to play over from your SuperDuper clone.
3. With SuperDuper - do exactly the same "cloning", you did in the first place and your done.

Go to the SuperDuper website. There you will find very detailed tutorials, how to use SuperDuper, to do just that.

If a Bootcamp Windows partition is involved, it gets a bit more complicated and involves a second software (winclone, if I remember correctly, I used for my backups of old Windows partitions).

edit: one last but essential word: Always have at least a second backup of what you are experimenting with, in the case, you screw up completely. You never know - one second, you think all is under control and You have the word - the next split second things go terribly wrong. Always have a 2nd tested and working backup of your important data - always!

 

Carbon Copy Cloner works as well.

 

Personally, I've found Superduper to be the easiest in creating a bootable copy of your HD to an external drive.

 

I'd like to know how your upgrade went. I have the same machine and am considering a hard drive upgrade as well. Between my itunes library and several vmware images that I use I barely have any space left.

 

Agree with this, mostly because it just works and it is free.

 

SuperDuper "... just works and it is free." too.

And it is even so good, that you can spend very little money on a license and have intelligent synchronizing too.

It takes me 10 minutes while having a coffee in the morning and surfing the internet for news, to hook up my external backup hdd, start SuperDuper and run the synchronization.

When I finish my coffee, I have an exact clone of my main harddrive and do not worry about a lost notebook during the day.

EDIT: I forgot: of course, the clone is fully bootable and indistinguishable from my main drive, after I booted it up via Firewire - no fuss in rebuilding, reinstalling, reconfiguring as in ancient Windows times.

 

Either one works, I use SuperDuper (with a license) just because if I had a problem I'd imagine that paid employees would be more likely to respond than whoever developed CCC.

Note that the demo of SuperDuper will do the basic job, but if you ever want to run scheduled backups you'll have to wipe the drive and start all over again (which could take hours). If you buy it, the program will do a "smart update" which just goes through and updates the changes instead of re-imaging the entire drive.