[kamina]

I want to change the drive in my iMac C2D, but don't want to reinstall all my applications. Currently the only way I can think off is to get a spare Macbook Pro from work, and use that to do two profile transferes (after moving all my music an movies somewhere away from my profile).

Is there any other way? I could put the current drive in an external enclosure with USB2, but can that be accessed in Target mode?

[TETENAL]

If you put your iMac in target disk mode and attach an USB2 drive, then there is no computer to do the booting! But of course you can boot from an external drive. You can also completely clone a drive using Disk Utility (some invisible files might become visible if you choose not to delete the target disk, which can be fixed).

[Big Mac]

Clone the drive using Disk Utility or a shareware app such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.

[kamina]

Thanks. I also have the option of taking both drives to work and doing it "offline" on a quad G5 (for example).

Or could it be done on a Linux host with dd even if it does not understand the hfs+ filesystem?

[TETENAL]

Just get an external Firewire-SATA or USB2-SATA enclosure, clone the drive with Disk Utility and swap them. You need an external drive for backups anyway.

[kamina]

Thanks, I think I'll manage. I allready have one 500GB external disk containing a backup of all my data. I prefer not to mix it into this as it's just a disaster recovery.

I'll remove the current drive from my mac, plug it (and a new bigger one) into a spare machine at work (so I get an offline backup) and use ditto, asr or rsync to copy all the data over (as mentioned in Bombich.com: Guide to Backing Up Mac OS X this article).

[kamina]

Would any mentioned methods also copy the resource forks? Rsync does not I believe.

[TETENAL]

Use Disk Utility with the option to erase the destination and you will get an exact copy.