My hard drive is creaking…and I want to back up everything to a Firewire drive while I install a new hd.
Is there any particular method for doing this? I want to ensure that EVERYTHING is copied over so that I can boot and work from the Firewire drive. I don’t want any files saying they’re locked and can’t be copied!!
Just wondering if there is any routine or method to ensure that the whole drive is copied intact?
SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner will do this. If you have another Mac, the very best way to run things is to put your ailing machine in Target Disk mode, then run either of those apps to make a block-level copy of the drive onto another FireWire device.
I do have another Mac but it only runs OS9 and has a puny 12gb drive.
But there is a 120gb Firewire (400) drive attached to the main mac. I thought I might be able to copy the drive to that and then, in System Preferences - Startup Disk, select the firewire drive to reboot.
Yes Hugh, you can do that, but a straight drag and copy wouldn’t copy
all of your permissions etc. You’d need SuperDuper or Carbon Copy
Cloner to do a FULL copy to the external first.
Hope this helps
Trev
On 5 May 2009, at 11:02, hugh wrote:
But there is a 120gb Firewire (400) drive attached to the main mac.
I thought I might be able to copy the drive to that and then, in
System Preferences - Startup Disk, select the firewire drive to
reboot.
Yes I understood that I would probably have to use one of those utilities as the copier. I’ve just downloaded SuperDuper, don’t know if there’s any difference/advantage of one v. the other?
Personally I use SuperDuper, and have never had any issues with it. I
also have CCC but never really had any need for it. It just seems a
bit more difficult to set up, but I’m sure others may find it the more
intuitive way to go. It’s all personal preference in the end anyway
when 2 programmes do the same thing
Good luck.
On 5 May 2009, at 11:22, hugh wrote:
Hi Trev,
Yes I understood that I would probably have to use one of those
utilities as the copier. I’ve just downloaded SuperDuper, don’t know
if there’s any difference/advantage of one v. the other?
Thanks for the advice on this backup/cloning routine - I got myself a Firewire drive (Formac) and Carbon Copy Cloner and have successfully done a clone backup of the hard drive and CCC says the target drive is bootable.
But how do you boot from an external Firwired drive?
I’ve held down all sorts of keys on startup … C…T…option… but don’t see any externally bootable notification? I know T is Firewire target mode, but I just get a Firewire icon floating round the screen, not even a mouse icon.
How to boot from the external drive is the question?
Hold down the Option key while you boot, and you should see an on-
screen menu to choose. Or, if you’re able to boot from the current
internal disk, make sure the FireWire disk is plugged in, and go to
the Startup Disk pane of the System Preferences application and choose
it there.
Walter
On Jun 13, 2009, at 9:59 AM, hugh wrote:
But how do you boot from an external Firwired drive?
Sometime around 13/6/09 (at 15:26 -0400) hugh said:
Thanks Walter!..the option key being the Apple key?
Nope! The Apple key is the Command key. The Option key is the Alt
key… optional, alternative…
US Mac keyboards tend to have real words rather than just symbols, at
least the last time I looked. International Mac keyboards tend to
have symbols instead (so nobody can read 'em, an equality thing)
and the Windows-originating “Alt” tag on the Option key.
Anyway, I restarted from the preferences pane (don’t know why I didn’t think of that!) and all is well.
My only surprise was the cloning took 2hrs 40mins - I was only cloning 53gb of info! For some reason I thought it would be much faster, say 20-30 mins. (over Firewire 400)
