MacBook Pro - HD Replacement

Try Carbon Copy Cloner-it lets you make a full copy of your hard disk, which you can boot.

Just clone your internal to the external, then replace the internal, then clone the external to the new internal.

Good luck!

Message was edited by: joshz

ajm56 wrote:
I am rookie here and need a little help. How do I do a complete back of HD. I want to replace hd but
not sure easy way to restore to new hd.

Cheers!

CarbonCopy is fine. So is SuperDuper. Either will make a perfect bootable clone of your present system which you can test before using it by booting it up.
When you put in your new HD, simple boot into the clone and re-clone back onto your new HD and reboot.
Nothing to it.

Can you clone the active system? or does it need to be done through Target Disk Mode

macwiz1220 wrote:
Can you clone the active system? or does it need to be done through Target Disk Mode

You backup the active system. You really don't have to do anything special.
You run CCC or SD and Voila! it's done. Just follow the excellent instructions.
I suggest not actually using the computer during the backup, but other than that, it's no more difficult than running any other app. Just click it and follow the yellow brick road.
Piece of cake.

OK. Cause I know that you can't create a DMG of the active system. It always returns some error (at least last time I did it in Tiger.)

Thanks.

P.S.- Sorry AJM, I don't mean to T.J.

No. It needs to be Firewire to boot.

if your mac is intel you can boot off a USB drive so that drive should be ok.

make sure that you format it mac os extended journaled with GUID partition scheme. It won't work otherwise and most new drives are preformated with Master Boot Record scheme so you'll need to change that.

ajm56 wrote:
its a Intel version so usb should be ok

Both my MBPs boot from USB as well as FW but it's really slow via USB compared to 800 MHz FW.
Still, it's fine for testing a bootable clone, which is all you need. You would not like to run via the USB port, although that is possible.

ajm56 wrote:
I guess I can do that from the utilities app correct?

thx V.K.

you can do that with Disk Utility (it's in /Applications/Utilities). select the whole external drive (the model, not the name) and click on the partition tab. set the format and set the number of partitions to 1 (or however many you want). then click on "options" and set the partition map in options. Finally, click "apply".