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Need Help from Mac user with experience

Nym

Nym

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 4, 2006
607
0
Porto, Portugal
Hi everyone!

I own a 24" iMac since last October and, unfortunately, my Pioneer Superdrive is slowly dying on me. It's making a lot of cranky noises and spits out the genuine Mac OS X install DVD and some others with different kinds of media.

I know that when technology is not working properly it's only a matter of time until it breaks completely and I'm aware that any day now my iMac will stop reading discs at all.

However, I'm still within my warranty period so I'm thinking about taking the iMac into the store. And my question is:

Is there any way for me to create a "clone" image of my HD into another External HD, format the HD (so my information stays protected) and then restore it all easily once the computer is fixed?

I really don't like the idea of someone having access to all my stuff, design work, pictures, keychain, etc etc...

I figure that, even with a password protected account, it wouldn't be too hard for a Mac wiz to login as root and access all my information.

I hope I've been clear about it, thx in advance for any help :)

BTW - In my country there isn't an official Apple Store, so, the store I'm going to is just a store that sells Apple related stuff only, but it's not in any way officially binded to Apple Inc. Hence my distrust.
 
Is there any way for me to create a "clone" image of my HD into another External HD, format the HD (so my information stays protected) and then restore it all easily once the computer is fixed?
Click to expand...

Yes. Superduper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.

I've used SuperDuper but not Carbon Copy Cloner.

Or you can use the Unix utility dd but that's for experienced users.
 
plinden said:
Yes. Superduper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.

I've used SuperDuper but not Carbon Copy Cloner.

Or you can use the Unix utility dd but that's for experienced users.
Click to expand...

But, after the computer is fixed, when I turn it on for the first time it won't have any OS installed, how can I restore it? just drag the contents of the external HD to the new one and it's done? :)

And BTW, I have a bootcamp partition to play games in Windows, will it restore it too? Thx for the help mate.
 
Boot to the external drive (since it's a clone, it'll be bootable), and repeat the cloning process the other direction.

I don't know about the BootCamp partition, sorry.
 
I can tell you that neither SuperDuper nor CCC will save and restore your Bootcamp partition. You'll have to do that from within Windows using one of the various Windows cloning utilities. To restore it, use the Bootcamp setup assistant to get the Bootcamp partition set up, then... I'm not sure what to do. I don't think you can boot Windows from an external drive created with a cloning utility so you'll need to use some sort of boot disk to get your system booted into Windows, then run the restore utility from there. I've never cloned/restored a Windows partition before, but this is how I'd assume it's done.
 
Typical - using Windows makes things an order of magnitude more complicated.

Bombich, who makes CCC, also offers NetRestore which can clone Windows partitions, but I have no idea how you would go about using this.
 
plinden said:
Typical - using Windows makes things an order of magnitude more complicated.

Bombich, who makes CCC, also offers NetRestore which can clone Windows partitions, but I have no idea how you would go about using this.
Click to expand...

Eheheh, thanks for the suggestions, I guess I'll try and PM Mad Jew, he usually knows what to do in all the situations :)

But for now, I guess I'll hold on to the iMac, after all, I can't imagine how I'm going to think straight without 24 incher away from home!

And hardware-wise? Can there be something stuck inside the drive that's causing this problem? And can the drive be accessed manually?

Ah.. forget it, I'll probably just wreck it even worse :D
 
i need help

:confused: my ibookG4 is slowly losing or corrupting the information on it, im running VirusBarrierx4 on it 6 times a day and its not finding anything. i put my ipod nano into it and it corrupted all of the songs on it exept for the ones i had bought that day plz help:confused:
 
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