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Cloning a drive in OSX: suggestions?

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macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 24, 2006
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My main drive is a 40GB pulled from an old eMac, and I just picked up a 250GB Segate 7200RPM with 16MB Cache for cheap. (sub $100).

Anyway, I want to move everything over to the new, faster, bigger drive but i'd rather not go thru the hassles of re-installing all my applications.

Back in my pre OSX days, you could just slide the whole drive onto the new drive and there it was.. doesn't seem to work that way in OSX.

I did try the Disk Utility 'restore' thing, by dragging my 40GB drive to the 'source' box, and my new 250GB drive to the 'destination' box, and after about 20 minutes, it said it was done.. but after switching the drives around, it wouldn't boot.

When I compare the original drive to the new drive, I notice the new drive has some extra folders in it that have little arrows next to them (simular to a Windows shortcut symbol) called 'etc', 'tmp' and 'var'.

Am I missing a step, or am I going about this the wrong way?
 
go to versiontracker.com and search drive clone or cloning, I can't remember the name but there is an app for cloning drives. I think it is freeware or shareware.
 
Well here's the update, just in case some other person in the future has this situation.

(I just hate it when a person starts a thread with a question and never bothers to post what they ended up doing!)

I tried CC Cloner, and it seemed to work, but the machine just wouldn't boot off the new drive.. so I finally said to heck with it, and installed Tiger on the new drive from scratch.

After the install, I put the old drive back in along with the new one to copy stuff over, and stumbled across the 'Migration Assistant' in the utilities folder.

With a few clicks, I was able to move over EVERYTHING.. and man, I mean everything!

Updates, applications, data, Mail settings and accounts, browser cookies and history, even my displays custom color profile!

In short, once the 'Migration Assistant' was done working it's magic, and I rebooted the computer, it was exactly the way I had it set up before, with two exceptions that remained 'default':

#1: I had to re-organize my Widgets (i.e. re-choose the Widgets I normally use, and select the area code for the weather and yellow pages widget)

#2: System Dock, which was just a matter of removing the default apps that I don't use (iChat, iCal) and dragging the ones I like to have there on in.

All in all quite easy. OSX saves the day.. AGAIN!
 
krestfallen said:
why not just using the apple disk utility?
Click to expand...

As I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread..

I did try the Disk Utility 'restore' thing, by dragging my 40GB drive to the 'source' box, and my new 250GB drive to the 'destination' box, and after about 20 minutes, it said it was done.. but after switching the drives around, it wouldn't boot.

When I compare the original drive to the new drive, I notice the new drive has some extra folders in it that have little arrows next to them (simular to a Windows shortcut symbol) called 'etc', 'tmp' and 'var'.

It just didn't work. Don't know if I did something wrong, missed a step, etc.. but it didn't work.

Migration Assistant worked like a charm, tho.
 
The "restore" option of DU is a rip off of CCC and (IMO) doesn't work worth a ****.

That being said, the var and tmp (and the arrows indicate that they are symbolic links to the originals, which reside in /private) and whatnot folders are completely normal. They're on your current install of OS X, they're just invisible to the Finder.
And finally, you could have simply used SuperDuper to clone your current install to the new drive without a problem. It works, I can assure you. :)
 
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