partitioning my drive and not losing stuff

[TrenchMouth]

i found this program called Carbon Copy Cloner and what i would like to do is use it to make a bootable disk image of my HD so that i can wipe the HD, partition it, and install YDL, and then just restore the dive back to normal.

Is this a realistic goal? is there an easier way to do it that i am overlooking? I would like to not have to reistall everything on my laptop. i have a firewire drive that i can store the disk image on so thats easy enough. if anyone knows a more straight forward method for doing this that would be great.

also if this is the best way to do it, how should i have the preferences set in CCC? it has a lot of options and i would like to not screw the stuff that is currently on my external or on my laptop

thanks for the help

 

[jxyama]

CCC should work fine. it's fairly intuitive and backing up to a FW drive should be a piece of cake. (i still have my bootable copy of jaguar from before i installed panther on my FWHD.)

i've never done "restore" but i don't see any problems with that part of CCC. should work well.

just bless the drive after you make a copy so you will be able to boot off of it just in case...

btw, what's YDL?

 

[Doctor Q]

In principle, your plan makes sense: back up your main drive to your firewire drive, repartition your main drive, and then copy back. The trick, as you suspect, is making it work on the first try. Once you repartition, you can't undo! I've never tried this myself, so it would be smart to get further advice (here or elsewhere), but I'll mention some concerns that come to mind:

1. I think the firewire copy should be created as a regular disk-to-disk clone, not as a disk image. In other words, I think you don't want to use the "Create a disk image on target" checkbox. I don't see any advantage to having a disk image (dmg file) instead of a regular disk filesystem on the firewire drive.

2. The firewire copy probably needs to be bootable. Reasoning: After you partition the hard drive, you'll need to boot off the firewire drive in order to run Carbon Copy Cloner to copy back. So I think you want to use the "Make bootable" checkbox (not the "Make it a NetBoot set" checkbox!).

3. If would be wise to test in advance whether the copy on the firewire drive is bootable and has all of your files before you repartition the main drive. Look through the firewire contents after cloning and see if your own files look OK, since they are more important than the O.S. and other software that you could reinstall in the event of a disaster.

4. You should do regular disk maintenance on your main drive before you start any of this. Right before you clone, use Disk Utility to do a Repair Disk and Repair Disk Permissions, since cloning a disk with problems already present can make the clone suspect. I suspect that you don't need to use the "Repair permissions before cloning" option in Carbon Copy Cloner since you will have already done it with Mac OS X itself.

5. Make sure the partition for Mac OS X that you leave on the main drive is big enough for the contents it will have. Don't cut it too close.

6. Make sure the firewire drive is cleaned off before you clone onto it, so you don't mix your data with leftovers from anything previously on the drive.

7. In case anything goes wrong, make sure you have your bootable Mac OS X CD-ROMs handy.

8. Make sure you have the latest version of CCC.

9. Check out this forum.

 

[TrenchMouth]

YDL= Yellow Dog Linux

You guys are great, thanks for the help!

One more question that should go in a different thread I guess:

I want to replace the current wiring in my iBooks screan as it is starting to wear and flickers if not in the right possition. Is there a place online that would have the proper documentation to get this job done? I wouldn't have a problem doing it myself so long as I had a guide of sorts. It is a shame that it is happening, but hey its been more than 2 years so i think its been pretty damn good.

Thanks again.