Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

goose · Jul 16, 2004, 04:13 PM

I'm looking to move my system from the current hard drive to a larer hard drive. I'm wondering if just using the Restore tool in Disk Utility is sufficient enough or will I need to get Carbon Coby Cloner as I've read in some previous posts.

When doing this procedure, is it required that I boot off a separate drive (not my main drive) or just recommended?

Thanks.

scoot · Jul 16, 2004, 11:44 PM

I've done this a few times.

Hook up the 2nd drive
. Boot to a 10.3 cd
Open disk util
Select the HD
Click the restore tab.
Select your old drive as 'source', and the new drive as 'target'.
go.

You do need to boot from a separate drive (can be the 10.3 cd, or any 10.3+ HD) to do this.

tooki · Jul 17, 2004, 11:41 AM

Those instructions are exactly right.

You don't need Carbon Copy Cloner. Restore does a beautiful job. Just two days ago I did it on one of my Macs at home to upgrade to a larger drive.

tooki

goose · Jul 17, 2004, 03:10 PM

Thanks for the replies. That's good to hear!

MarkDouma™ · Jul 18, 2004, 05:42 AM

I would recommend that you go with Carbon Copy Cloner and avoid using Disk Utility's ASR (Apple Software Restore) Restore command.

Unfortunately, Disk Utility has quite a few bugs, and 'asr' may be among them.

A few months ago, I got a new 80 GB hard drive and needed to clone all of the volumes of my existing 80 GB over to the new 80 GB. (A little background: I have 12 partitions, one of which is my user partition, and the others have various versions of OS X, such as 10.2.6, 10.2.8, 10.2.8 with latest security updates, 10.3.4, and an OS 9 one, all of which I use to test the software I'm developing.) I spent the better part of a day trying to get Disk Utility, both the Panther version as well as the Jaguar versions, to partition this new 80 GB in the same way as the existing one. (And yes, these drives were the exact same size.) All attempts failed, and I basically had to boot up into OS 9 and use Drive Setup to even be able to correctly partition the new hard drive. Disk Utility, in both OS X 10.3.x and OS X 10.2.x have bugs that can cause the partitioning function to calculate negative sizes for partitions, a partition setup where there are vast amounts of missing space after you add up all the individual partitions, a partition setup where the sizes on partitions that are supposedly "locked for editing" actually change as the result of changing the sizes of the other partitions, and much more.

Anyway, after finally getting it partitioned, I used the Restore tab to clone each of the 7 partitions on the original hard drive to those on the new hard drive. After reformatting the original HD (writing 0's to it to eliminate the bad blocks that were on it), I cloned the 7 partitions back to this original disk. After that, I began experiencing some trouble with the permissions on one of the volumes, namely the one I use as my user partition. Hundreds of files and folders in my user folder were apparently left with root ownership and were therefore read only to me, or completely inaccessible.

That's why you may want to concider CCC over Disk Utility, until Apple manages to work out the bugs in Disk Utility.

Hope this helps....

tooki · Jul 18, 2004, 01:46 PM

What you did is highly atypical, and probably not done right.

If you want to clone the whole disk, preserving the partitions, you can do it if you have a spare drive to create a disk image on. Create a new image from device (not folder!) of the source drive (not volume), and save it to the spare. Then you can restore that image back to another drive. Caution: images from devices include the partition map, so the destination drive must be the same size or larger. Any smaller, and it's... bad. Any bigger, and the extra space is wasted. It works great for duplicating identical drives.

tooki

Big Mac · Jul 18, 2004, 08:37 PM

I'm not trying to insinuate anything, but most all of us should be heeding the words of tooki and the other learned admins around here. When tooki tells us something, he speaks from a considerable amount of experience. You can be certain he's correct. I'm not brown nosing; I'm certainly not looking for anything in return. I am, however, thankful for the wonderful advice we receive here.