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Upgrading Primary Hard Drive?

M

Mac In School

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 21, 2007
1,286
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I'm certain this has been answered 100 times, but I searched and found nothing. Sorry if it's a re-run.

I'm thinking of upgrading my Mac Pro's primary hard drive. I'm guessing the process goes a little something like this:

1. Put new drive in a free bay.

2. Use SuperDuper (once it's Leopard-ready) or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old HD to the new HD.

3. Remove old primary HD, move new one into its slot.

Is that pretty much it?
 
The 3rd step isn't necessary, strictly speaking. You can choose the new disk to be the boot volume in System Preferences and leave the original boot disk in it's place if you want.
 
What I plan to do is have Time Machine make a full backup of my boot disk, start up with the System Restore Discs and tell it to restore my Time Machine backup to what will then become my boot disk. Should work fine.
 
Makes sense. I was just thinking it would be a good housekeeping practice to keep my primary drive in the first slot, just to help keep track of which one it is. Nice to know I don't need to, though.
 
Which would be better, and why?

I'd really like this to be as seamless as possible. I don't want to have to reconfigure anything after the upgrade, if at all possible.
 
MikeL said:
You're not the first to mention this. Why? There's nothing to be gained by moving the new drive.
Click to expand...

For myself, I removed the old drive entirely. I have three 500GB drives in there now, so the 320GB just seems pointless to leave in there. I'm a fairly orderly person so leaving the first bay open just seemed "wrong." :p
 
siorai said:
...I'm a fairly orderly person so leaving the first bay open just seemed "wrong." :p
Click to expand...

LOL. Were we separated at birth, I wonder?

Same here. I'm going to use the old drive as a data drive. It just belongs further down the stack.
 
Along these same lines would anything change if going from single disk to RAID? I'm moving from a MBP to my new MP with RAID card as my primary machine. I'm planning on setting up a RAID5 array with a few partitions (OS, Photos, Video, Scratch, etc.). My plan with some ?'s...

1) Take standard drive out of MP when it arrives and add (4) new 750GB drives (bought outside of Apple of course!). Having never used Apple's RAID stuff before, are the settings software based (obviously the actual processing is done on the card but I don't know if I need to setup something before I pull the drive it shipped with)?

2) Set up partitions from MBP using MP in target disk mode? Is this possible?

3) Use CCC to ghost MBP drive to new OS partition on MP.

Is there a better/easier way to do this?

Thanks!

Tony
 
I was interested in doing this also--but on a smaller scale.

I just installed a new 500gig hard drive on my G5. My old 160 has 4 years of old files and crap on it so I don't want to clone the whole thing...should I move my music and photos over to the new one, then erase the old one and move them back?
Seems tedious, but I feel like it might be my only option.

EDIT: Or should I keep my music and photos on the 500gb and use the 160 for time machine?? Is that big enough for time machine??
Sorry for all the questions, first time doing this sort of thing.
 
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