How to tranfer a clone to my new hard drive?

[Effortless]

Hi folks,

hope you can help.

I will soon be upgrading the hard drive on my MacBook Pro. I have the new drive ready to install. I also have an external usb drive loaded with a clone and a backup (produced with Personal Backup V4).

After I have installed the new hard drive, what is the best way to copy either the clone or the backup to the drive.

I read somewhere that clones are bootable from an external drive if they are firewire, but my external drive is just USB 2. Can I still boot from that, and use Personal Backup to clone from the external to the internal drive?

Thanks in advance!
Effortless

 

[chas0001]

You will be able to boot from an external USB drive, the firewire restriction was for Macs with PowerPC processors.

If you want a free way to clone the drive you can use DISK UTILITY (see thumbnail). Open it up and click on the restore tab then drag the disks from the left into the correct source and destination. It can be a bit slow.

Alternatively use Personal Backup. Although I have this program and after cloning a disk it was not bootable for some reason.

SuperDuper is also an excellent program. Very quick and can perform incremental backups too. This is my backup program of choice. SuperDuper

 

[Effortless]

So, I CAN boot up from an external USB 2 drive? Cool!

Once I've booted up, presumably I run Personal Backup from the external drive, and clone everything back to the internal drive. It worriesw me though that you say your clone in Personal Backup wan't bootable.

But how do I boot from the external drive? The only way choice I've seen is to hold down the c key to boot from the CD.

Thanks,
Effortless.

 

[chas0001]

So, I CAN boot up from an external USB 2 drive? Cool!

Once I've booted up, presumably I run Personal Backup from the external drive, and clone everything back to the internal drive. It worriesw me though that you say your clone in Personal Backup wan't bootable.

But how do I boot from the external drive? The only way choice I've seen is to hold down the c key to boot from the CD.

Thanks,
Effortless.

Connect the USB drive.

Restart the computer, as its starting to boot hold down the LEFT ALT key. A screen will appear showing you the bootable drives available. Select the USB drive.

Alternatively you can go into System Preferences and choose STARTUP DISK. Then select the USB drive. NOTE that this change is permanent, meaning that from that point onwards your computer will try and boot from the USB drive (that is until you change it back to the internal drive).

Either way you will be able to check that the USB drive is bootable because if it isn't it will not appear in either of the options above.

 

[Effortless]

Many thanks Chas, I'll give it a go!

Effortless.