[turtle]

I'm looking to replace the HDD in my MB with something like a 160-200GB drive. My plan is to replace the drive in the next week or so. I want it to be a smooth swap, drive for drive without having to reinstall everything.

So how do I do this? I am expecting to have an external case for the current 60GB that's in there. So should I put the new drive in, boot off of Install DVD and then transfer from External to New Internal? Will this allow me to reboot on HDD and have it not miss a beat? If now, how can I do it so this is the case? TIA

[turtle]

Ok, so I ordered this drive from OWC. It should be here early next week.

[chucker]

The most effortless solution is to use SuperDuper, and no, you won't have to buy it to do this; the free version will do. Assuming, of course, that you have a partition on the external drive that you can, temporarily, use for SuperDuper to completely erase and copy to.

Then you'd simply first do a complete copy from your old internal drive to your external drive.

Second, you'd put the new internal drive in.

And finally, you'd boot off the external drive and launch SuperDuper there (since you just copied the entire partition, it'll be on there as well), and then copy from there back to the new internal drive.

[turtle]

Perfect, thanks!

[turtle]

This didn't work like I thought it would. SuperDuper! kept crashing on the MB. So I now have it in Target Disk Mode connected to my Mini that is currently running SuperDuper!. I had to copy the MB target disk to a network location since I don't have enough room on the Mini for a replication of the MB drive and only on FW port.

So now I'm creating a "Disk Image" on the network drive that I'll then transfer and open on the new drive once it is installed.

Am I doing this right now that SuperDuper! didn't work like it should have on the MB?

[chucker]

Originally Posted by turtle2472 This didn't work like I thought it would. SuperDuper! kept crashing on the MB.

What? Wow. I've never had it crash.

[turtle]

Originally Posted by chucker What? Wow. I've never had it crash.

Kinda sucks doesn't it? I wouldn't even get an error message. The app would just go away mid-transfer. It seems to be working now though on the Mini. Maybe it didn't like the MB for some reason. I just hope the new image will play nice on the new drive without issues.

I'm gonna end up backing up other parts of the original drive anyway.

[chucker]

I dunno man, it sounds like a serious problem. Have you tried repairing the partition?

[turtle]

Originally Posted by chucker I dunno man, it sounds like a serious problem. Have you tried repairing the partition?

I ran DU and repaired permissions before undergoing this, but that's about it.

Would it be bad to run DiskWarrior from the Mini on the MB's drive? PPC checking an Intel drive. It doesn't seem like it should be an issue, but I thought I would check anyway.

[turtle]

After running the MB in target disk mode and using SuperDuper! on my Mini it worked out well. I ended up having to use my 80GB iPod as my destination drive though, the network was just too slow. It was the only one I could free up enough without actually loosing my data. So I had SD create a disk image on it in a new folder and then after swapping the drives I had SD transfer the data back to the MB via target disk mode. One reboot on the MB and we are up and running with 160GB of open space, soon to be overrun by Aperture Library, iTunes, iPhoto, Parallels, etc.

Thanks for your help chucker!

[chucker]

Glad it all worked out!