[chasg]

Hi All,

I just swapped my internal drive for a larger one, and now am having problems (and I'd like to know why so I can figure out how to fix them).

Note: I had my local apple reseller (and authorised repair centre) swap out the 160GB drive from my C2D MBP and put in a 250GB disk (taken out of a LaCie Porsche design portable drive.

Before swapping, I used Super Duper to clone my 160GB drive to the external 250GB. So, when the 250GB drive was put inside, I'd have a seamless transition.

That didn't happen, and now I'm having problems:
1) I can't repair the permissions of the now internal 250GB drive in Disk Utility (even if I start up from the now external 160GB drive).
2) I can't see the 250GB drive in the Startup Disk control panel (even though the machine starts up from this disk)
3) I can't launch Address Book
4) I can't do a .Mac sync

I can of course wipe this 250GB internal drive and install Leopard from scratch and move my stuff off the formerly-internal-now-external 160GB disk, but I'd really rather not spend all that time doing that, but I don't have to (that's why I cloned the disk before swapping!).

Any hints? Perhaps Disk Warrior? (even though Disk First Aid found nothing wrong).

Chas

[bishopazrael]

Back up your data and start fresh.

Sure you can sit here and try and figure it out. But you can back uup your data in about 1 hour. You can wipe your drive with your OS X install disc and reinstall all your apps in about an hour and a half. You can transfer your backed up data back to your drive in an hour. You can set up your mail and other sundries in about 30 minutes. Total cost : 4 hours.

Total time to collaberate with the board and figure out what's wrong, and maybe or maybe not have the collective come back and tell you to reinstall fresh.... days.

Thing is... installing fresh will tell you if something is wrong with the drive itself or if its something else.


Take your pick.

[chasg]

Yeah, installing fresh was always an option, but you'd think that a cloned drive would work as, well, a clone!

You did know that a clone is a backup, right?

Before wiping the drive, I've started up from the external 160, and I'm going to use Super Duper to clone that drive to the internal 250 (last time I cloned the 160 to the 250 when their positions were swapped and the 250 was external). If that doesn't work, then wiping and going vanilla will be the order of the day.

Thanks again for contributing,

Chas

[MacosNerd]

How was the installation. I opted to get an external drive because of the daunting task of dismantling the computer. I was nervous that I'd damage it, and of course that wouldn't be covered

[chasg]

Problem solved!

What did I do wrong the first time? Well, turns out that Super Duper (despite it's formidable reputation) isn't the right app for what I needed, and CarbonCopy is.

When you clone a disk with SD, it mentions something about not copying over certain files that Apple recommends not be copied. I'm guessing that those files are actually essential (well, at least when you're cloning a disk to be swapped in).

CarbonCopy copies everything. So, I used CC to clone the 160GB external disk (which used to be the internal disk) to the 250GB internal disk (which used to be the external disk) and rebooted, and all of the problems I detailed in my OP are gone (so far). Yaaaay!

MacosNerd: I've been inside many a laptop in my time (with my soldering iron sometimes!) and I was even called in by my local Apple store a few times to open up TiBooks for them (annoying suckers, those TiBooks). But, because this MBP was still under warranty, I decided to pay a certified Apple Tech to do the job. I've probably still voided my official warranty, but the store (from which I bought the machine anyway) will honour my warranty. It wasn't cheap, and it only took them 20 minutes (nice), and it was totally worth it.

Cheers!

Chas

[Simon]

I've heard of Super Duper issues before. And I've also experienced problems with CCC myself.

I don't know why so many people go with problematic third-party solutions when Apple supplies a perfectly working tool to clone a disk with every OS X copy:
/Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility > Restore
or asr on the CLI.

And since Apple's tool it's part of DiskUtility it's also available on the OS X install DVD so you don't even need a working partition to clone from or clone to.

[tomrock]

I'm glad it worked out for you but you should probably note that SuperDuper specifically says it doesn't work with Leopard. That may be the issue here.