Trying to mirror, "could not allocate memory"

[jknight8907]

My Macbook Pro's hard drive has started making a lot of noise recently so I'm attempting to replace it. However, when I boot from the Snow Leopard CD and try to use Disk Utility to 'restore' my Macbook's HD to the new HD (in an external dock), it seems to get started copying, then says "could not allocate memory". What's going on here?

 

[madog]

Disk Utility either needs quite a bit of additional space to clone, or at least another drive of equal or greater value to the source. For example, a drive with 95GB used (of 120GB) isn't able to copy over to a 100GB drive. I'm not sure of the necessary requirement though.

Might not be the correct answer as I don't remember DU's exact error for the above scenario, but it could be the case.

Using an app like SuperDuper may avoid that problem, but you might not be able t do that.

 

[jknight8907]

Disk Utility either needs quite a bit of additional space to clone, or at least another drive of equal or greater value to the source. For example, a drive with 95GB used (of 120GB) isn't able to copy over to a 100GB drive. I'm not sure of the necessary requirement though.

Might not be the correct answer as I don't remember DU's exact error for the above scenario, but it could be the case.

Using an app like SuperDuper may avoid that problem, but you might not be able t do that.

Thanks, but it's a 160gb copying to a 500gb.

 

[cjmillsnun]

Thanks, but it's a 160gb copying to a 500gb.

Carbon copy cloner FTW.

http://www.bombich.com/

 

[madog]

Thanks, but it's a 160gb copying to a 500gb.

Last I can think of, is the external drive formatted properly?

 

[larkost]

If you already know that the drive is failing, then Disk Utility (and to a lesser extent Carbon Copy Cloner) is the wrong tool to use. Disk Utility (rather the underlying tools that it shares with CCC) will fail silently when there are disk errors.

Rather the better way of doing it is to use something like rsync that will make attempts at every file, work with checksums, is resumable, and log when it fails.

 

[tnhybrid]

FYI - I had a world of trouble with this. Both Disk Utility and Carbon Copy Cloner produced 'cnam' errors. I have an Other World Computing drive that's both FW and USB - tried FW copy; tried repartitioning; no dice.

Finally on a whim tried Super Duper! Worked great. FYI.