How do you change your boot drive ?

[HooHar]

If one buys a Mac Pro with basic HDD spec, how easy is it to change the boot drive to say a Raptor. What are the practical steps involved in ensuring you copy your original boot drive to the new one. Is it easy or troublesome?

Cheers

 

[samh004]

In a Mac Pro you could add a second drive and then choose to boot off it from System Preferences > Startup Disc.

 

[hayduke]

samh004 is correct from one perspective, but I think the OP might be asking how to transfer an existing system from one drive and then boot from the new drive.

In order to do this you have basically two options:

1) Install OS X and apps on the new drive and then use the Migration Assistant to transfer personal files etc.

2) Use SuperDuper (my preference) or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone/copy the original drive to the new one.

Good luck!

 

[kudukudu]

Yes definitely super duper is the way to go. I use it all the time for cloning drives as part of my backup strategy and the great thing about this program is that a single click+reboot makes your backup drive your primary drive.

 

[kittiyut]

Another advantage of using SuperDuper (Leopard compatible now?) or Carbon Copy is that the new drive is created with all the files deframented!

When I upgraded to Leopard, I used CC to clone my Laptop (5,400 rpm drive) to an external 7,200 rpm drive (FW800 connected) to back up my Tiger installation which was taking so much time to boot. Using the cloned drive to boot via FW800 cut down the boot time by a third!