Cloning / Changing Boot Drive

[Floris]

Hello,

I have a Mac Pro from 2006, and it has hard drives in all four bays.
The first drive is the 250gb default drive from Apple.
The rest are Seagate and Samsung.
The setup is: 250 (Mac) / 320 (Empty) / 750 (Backup) / 1000 (Media)
The 250gb is getting full every once in a while, and I might wish to replace it with another 1000 or even the new seagate 1.5TB one. Whatever .. but since it only has the OS + Program files and some stuff in /home, I want to use the bigger drives for the data. And use the 320gb as the boot drive.

So, what I want:

Move (clone) the 250gb to the 320gb
Reboot and boot from the 320gb, replacing the 250gb. Which I can then make empty and use until I replace it with a 1000gb drive.

I can use CCC to clone the 250gb to the 320gb.
But is that enough?
How can I then reboot and have the 320gb as if it was the 250gb, ...
And how can I be certain it is booting from the cloned 320gb, or the original 250gb once I am back into OSX?
And can I then repartition the 250gb and still reboot, or will this ruin the master boot record or boot menu setup, etc?
I have no experience with this (yet). And am afraid to end up with a non booting system and a long night of trying to restore using the retail disk for leopard.

I hope I am making sense. I just want to move my boot to the 320, and get more space for my boot hd. And have everything be the same.

 

[TEG]

From the way I understand about how CCC works it should clone the 250 onto the 320, OS and all, then you just boot off of the 320.

That being said, I would be more inclined to just Install OS X directly onto the 320, then transfer stuff from the 250 to the 320, that way any old configuration files or preferences and cookies are not transferred.

TEG

 

[Floris]

From the way I understand about how CCC works it should clone the 250 onto the 320, OS and all, then you just boot off of the 320.

That being said, I would be more inclined to just Install OS X directly onto the 320, then transfer stuff from the 250 to the 320, that way any old configuration files or preferences and cookies are not transferred.

TEG

I want a 100% match, I don't want to loose my preferences. For obvious reasons. I just want to move it to a different hdd and continue as usual.

I think fresh installing leopard and moving things over is 100% NOT what I want. I get the impression though you have no experience with this and are just guessing, which is what I have been doing. I came here to find certainty. But thank you for your feedback and for thinking along.

 

[Dark Dragoon]

I have a Mac Pro 2006, I have cloned my boot drive (OS X install) a few times to both internal and external drives using CCC.

Once the clone is complete you can go to System Preferences > Startup Disk and select the 320GB drive. Or at startup you can hold down the Option (alt) key to choose which drive to boot from.

To be certain you can either pull out the 250GB, or you could open up Disk Utility and see which drive has Repair Disk disabled as this will be the drive you are booting from. About This Mac should also tell you the name of the Startup Disk.

Once you have booted from the 320GB drive you can do whatever you like as far as repartitioning/formatting goes for the 250GB drive.

 

[Floris]

I have a Mac Pro 2006, I have cloned my boot drive (OS X install) a few times to both internal and external drives using CCC.

Once the clone is complete you can go to System Preferences > Startup Disk and select the 320GB drive. Or at startup you can hold down the Option (alt) key to choose which drive to boot from.

To be certain you can either pull out the 250GB, or you could open up Disk Utility and see which drive has Repair Disk disabled as this will be the drive you are booting from. About This Mac should also tell you the name of the Startup Disk.

Once you have booted from the 320GB drive you can do whatever you like as far as repartitioning/formatting goes for the 250GB drive.

Thank you, the missing puzzle peaces are clicking, and I feel a lot more comfortable moving ahead with this step.

 

[Virtuoso]

If you're just cloning the drive, you don't actually have to use a 3rd party utility - you can do it from OSX Disk Utility.

Click your boot drive, then click the Restore tab. Drag and drop your 250Gb boot drive into the Source field. Drag and drop your 320Gb drive into the Destination field. Click Restore.

Once it's done, just set your startup disk to the 320Gb one and you're done. Reboot to test it's ok and then you can format your 250Gb drive.

(The 3rd party utils are useful where you want to do incremental backups - you don't have to back up the entire drive each time - just the files which have changed or are new).

 

[monkey86]

ccc is good and free, disk utility is as good

 

[kalex]

Yep CCC or super duper will do the job just fine. it will clone the system disk one to one and with super duper u can even make it bootable and boot of it after clone is done

 

[Sesshi]

As the above poster said, SD might be a better tool to invest in - both for this process and for the purpose of usable backups when Time Machine screws up.