[Sub]

I recently tried to copy several episodes of scrubs to my single 160 gig HD on my G5, turns out it is full, to the Gigabyte. I was thinking about this Western Digital - 500GB Internal Hard Drive - WD5000KSRTL HD, it's SATA so it should be compatible. I want to transfer everything from my current HD to this one, and make it the default...startup disk. How would I go about doing this? Thanks.

[chris v]

Use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to clone the old drive to the new, then change your startup disk in System Preferences.

[Simon]

Clone the old to the new disk with /Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility > Restore

[Sub]

I used the restore and made the new HD the startup disk, however these folders that I have selected in the picture below are not on the original hard drive, or they are and are just alieses on the new drive, are the original folders actually on the new HD, or still on the old one? If they are on the old one, where do they go in the new one so that they don't have to be alieses?

[Simon]

Those folders exist also on your old HD. You can verify that by opening a shell and doing
ls -al /

The folders you marked should normally be hidden and I'm not entirely sure why you're seeing them. Do you have a /.hidden file? Have you tried repairing permissions after booting from the new drive?

BTW, the aliases should point to directories on your new disk like this:
/etc -> /private/etc
/tmp -> /private/tmp
/var -> /private/var

[Sub]

I tried deleting them, just the alieses and the next time the machine started up, it led me through the new user set up, like when you turn it on for the first time. So I shut the machine down, booted in the the old drive, and re-formatted the new drive and started it up, and the files were there again. I will try to repair the permissions. BTW, when I look at the alieses in the get info, it just says / for "where".

One other thing, when I open iTunes, and play a song it asks me to find the source file for the song, I know where they all are, but is there a way to show iTunes the new location without either revealing it for every song, or reloading them?

[Simon]

Those aliases shouldn't be deleted! They need to exist for OS X to work properly.

The aliases should be in / but they should point to something in /private/ (verify that in the "Location" entry of the Information panel).

The reason iTunes can't find the stuff is likely because your / has changed its name from [Full] to Shake 500. You can tell iTunes where the Library is by going to Preferences > Advanced > General and selecting the new path to your iTunes music folder (that would be something like /Users/yourName/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music)

[Sub]

Thanks, but I couldn't wait, so I just re-loaded the library. I'll just leave the aliases there.