Replacing System Drive - SuperDuper, or Fresh install? Advice wanted

[Sean Dempsey]

It's been about 3 weeks since I got my Mac Pro, and I've learned a massive amount about the Apple world. I've come up with a hairbrained idea, and I want to see if this will work how I think.

Okay, I have the 250gig drive that came with it, a raptor150, and a pair of 320's, so all my bays are full. I got the raptor for photoshop scratch.

Well, with 5 gigs of ram, in the 3 weeks of normal office use, I am not sure it's hit the scratch disk once. My files are all web-sized, so we're talking PSD's that are 800x800 at 72dpi, and then tons of smaller images under 100k each usually.

Having learned that after using my RAM, photoshop will offload to the scratch, but since I have 5 gigs of ram OSX puts the "scratch" stuff onto more ram. So I never really use the Raptor because I have alot of ram, and very small files.

So, I am feeling the raptor is going to waste. So my idea was to take it (its blank) and put it in the first drive bay, and then either:

1) install OSX fresh onto it, and just reinstall my apps, OR...
2) use SuperDuper to copy my System250 drive to the raptor, and then select the raptor as the system boot drive.

I know that installing OSX fresh onto the raptor would work, but that's time consuming, reinstalling all my apps and tracking down all my serial numbers and such. Especially since the 250gig drive is totally up to date and has the working OS right there.

So, could I really use Superduper to clone the system drive to the Raptor, and then just put the raptor in bay 1, and it will boot to that? If I pull the existing system drive out, what tells the machine to boot to the raptor?

And also, can I move a working OS to a different physical drive without ill effects, like volume names and such not lining up? How would I go about accomplishing this idea?

 

[rontheancient]

So, could I really use Superduper to clone the system drive to the Raptor, and then just put the raptor in bay 1, and it will boot to that? If I pull the existing system drive out, what tells the machine to boot to the raptor?

And also, can I move a working OS to a different physical drive without ill effects, like volume names and such not lining up? How would I go about accomplishing this idea?

If you already bought SuperDuper then I would stick with it, otherwise...

I believe Disk Utility can make a disk image of your system250 and the restore function can push that image back to where ever you want. Boot from your recovery disk, and go into Disk Utility. This is what I have heard and I am also curious about this as I want to make a recovery image of my Powerbook. Other please help!

My assumption with SuperDuper! and Disk Utility is that it works like Norton Ghost, in a sense that it copies everything, so you wont need to worry about volume names or ill effects...unless you recover to a physically bad drive.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

Bumping this thread to hopefully get some more clarification.

Let me know if you see anything wrong with this plan. I think this is what I am going to do tomorrow night. This is my work machine, so I really don't want to screw it up, but the temptation to fiddle is too great.

1 - SuperDuper system drive to the Raptor
2 - turn off machine, remove system drive pysically
3 - boot to OSX DVD, use diskutility to change the drivename from Raptor to "Macintosh HD", same as the previous volume.
4 - select it as my startup drive
5 - restart machine

Now, this should give me a 100% transparent switch to a new drive, without upsetting my System at all, correct? I have alot of things that reference my current system drive as "Macintosh HD", so if I change the volume name in the raptor before I boot to it, that should make it so all my programs and such still function exactly the same?

Is this a sound plan, moving an active system to a different physical drive without reinstalling anything? Or am I asking for trouble and should just reinstall OSX on my Raptor and not try this plan?

I really want to get the OS on the raptor, and then RAID0 my 320GB drives. I wanted to do this when the computer was new 3 weeks ago, but I didn't know enough about OSX to attempt it. Now I do, but my machine is all configured and has apps installed just the way I like it.

Thoughts on this proposed migration?

 

[Sean Dempsey]

So far, I am happy to report that everything went smoothly. I did just as I had planned, used SuperDuper to copy my drive over, then I restarted the machine and selected the Raptor as the boot drive, rebooted, and it came right up.

so now the Seagate250 is just sitting there, its still the same as before, so technically its bootable too for now.

I did change the volume names though, so now the Raptor is "Macintosh HD" and the old one of the same name is "Seagate 250"


The last time I booted up, it did take a LONG time to boot using the raptor, but I read that is normal for the first boot or 2 while the kernal cache builds or something? I'll try restarting again and see what happens.

 

[Rob500]

I did the same with my Quad Core, except I used Carbon Copy Cloner.
Its a nice feeling to have a spare bootable drive just, in case .

 

[termina3]

I did something similar to this... Separated a boot drive from a RAID 1 setup. All of my files were put on the RAID, with apps and OS X on the boot (files were aliased from the boot over to the RAID volume).

Sounds neat! Have fun!

 

[bcpursel]

is it possible to do that same thing with a HD from a G4 to a G5?
i also would like to just copy everything from my current HD now, so i dont have to go through all the installs and serial number tracking.

since the G4 uses an ATA100 and the G5 i am getting will have SATA, i can't put one in the other machine to clone.

wanted to know if it will work if the 2 machines were hooked up via ethernet with file sharing on...could i select my HD from the G4 and SuperDuper/DiskUtility/CarbonCopy it to the G5?

let me know my options...

 

[hayduke]

is it possible to do that same thing with a HD from a G4 to a G5?
i also would like to just copy everything from my current HD now, so i dont have to go through all the installs and serial number tracking.

since the G4 uses an ATA100 and the G5 i am getting will have SATA, i can't put one in the other machine to clone.

wanted to know if it will work if the 2 machines were hooked up via ethernet with file sharing on...could i select my HD from the G4 and SuperDuper/DiskUtility/CarbonCopy it to the G5?

let me know my options...

I don't think you can do it over ethernet. Most "cloning" software doesn't work for network drives, including CarbonCopyCloner and SuperDuper. You are probably better off connected the G4 to the G5 via firewire and booting the G4 in "target disk mode" Google for more info.