Help with a drive-copy

[Dr.Pants]

Alright, here's the low-down;

I would like to copy my HDD onto a second one, and then try and boot off of the second. The big thing is... The first HDD would be running the system at the same time as the cloning. What program should I use, or how should I go about it?

They are two different sizes of drive (the smaller being the second, but the amount of data on the first I wish to copy is still less then my boot drive) I assume Carbon Copy Cloner, from some offhand remarks by other members, may not work this way... so that is why I happen to be confused.

Any suggestions? Any clarifications?

 

[sushi]

1. Down load Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to your Mac.

2. Connect your external HD.

3. Use Disk Utilities to erase the external HD. Make sure you partition with the GUID partition map.

4. Start CCC.

5. Clone from your Mac HD to the External HD.

6. When complete, quit CCC.

7. Restart your Mac.

8. During the boot process, hold down the ALT key and then select to boot from the external HD.

 

[Dr.Pants]

Thank you very much! For some reason I had the idea that CCC was unable to copy the boot drive for whatever reason; thanks for clearing that up!

 

[sushi]

You most welcome!

CCC works very well and is my clone software of choice.

Some folks like SuperDuper which works similar to CCC.

In the FWIW department, on a weekly basis using CCC, I clone to alternating external HDs. Works well.