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Level 1

0 points

Can I clone and transfer from the internal hard drive to an external hard drive ?

I got an intel duo iMac, the machine is very good even if it is almost 3 years old. But with the internal hard drive having 320 Gb I am running out of hard drive space. I have looked into changing the internal hard drive but that involves having to send the machine away to have that done. So I was wondering if I could just transfer all the Mac OS X and all the applications and settings within three user accounts to say a 2 TB external hard drive, and boot from that, using cloning software.

Alternatively, is there a way to transfer the iPhoto and iMovie libraries to an external hard drive. That would free up space. I do not know how, if that is possible, although I have managed that with iTunes. My iMac is running Snow Leopard.

Regards from John5801

Posted on Jun 20, 2011 1:01 AM

22 replies

Aug 16, 2011 4:49 AM in response to john5801

"Could not solve the issue of being able to boot into my firewire drive"

John, you can hold down the Option Key as you restart the machine and select from any connected drives. Here's an Apple Support document that shows this: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1310

"1) Try to do it directly using the iMac, by downloading a fresh copy of Lion, if possible. Yourself, or others can advise me how to do this. Once the download starts, I can direct it into the external firewire drive, then boot from there. The drive is already erased and re-formatted in the GUID Partition Table option, so is ready to accept the download."

This sounds like you are starting over here. Screen Casts Online has a YouTube video that walks you through the process of making a Lion install drive. The address of that video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk7eJbLOCNw and Don starts talking about making the Lion Install USB Drive at about 10:00 minutes into the clip.

"I got issues in the laptop, with iPhoto not responding in one account."

Might want to Repair Permissions on that drive in the Disk Utility.

samberl

Level 4

2,007 points

Aug 16, 2011 5:03 AM in response to john5801

John,

I don't like to be contrary, but I do think you are better off upgrading the internal drive on your iMac than using the external drive as a startup drive.

If you are comfortable with electronics, you can do it yourself, otherwise, any Apple Authorised Reseller can do it for you. It is about one hour of labour, if you provide the HD.

Btw, all MacBook Pros come with Firewire 800. You just need a Firewire 800 cable.

Is this the drive you have

http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?id=10330

It has both Firewire 400 and Firewire 800. FW800 is faster than FW400. You also have FW800 on your iMac.

You can connect your drive to your MBP using FW800 and install Snow Leopard and then, Lion.

Sam

john5801 Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 16, 2011 10:29 AM in response to samberl

Have tried the Option key thing, as found that. I am now downloading Lion again. Will try to make the download into the firewire drive soon.

My eyes saw no Firewire port on my MacBook Pro....which is a MacBook aluminium unibody style bought in March 2009. Soon after that Apple renamed that MacBook to Macbook Pro. Will investigate further if Lion finishes downloading here.

Aug 16, 2011 11:38 AM in response to john5801

john5801 wrote:

... no Firewire port on my MacBook Pro....which is a MacBook aluminium unibody style bought in March 2009. Soon after that Apple renamed that MacBook to Macbook Pro. Will investigate further if Lion finishes downloading here.

John, the Firewire 400 and 800 cables are very different from each other. Under the  menu in the upper left corner of your desktop, you can lookup more info about your MacBook Pro and see what Firewire you might have. I just sold a 2009 early MacBook Pro 13" to a friend and it had a Firewire 800 port which is rectangular with 2 small ears vs. the 400 that is more of a stretched out "D".

john5801 Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 16, 2011 2:46 PM in response to john5801

Successfully installed Lion on the firewire drive. Got the original first installation of Lion on the internal hard drive. Can boot into either now, using Start Up Disk in System Preferences, so the previous issue has gone 🙂. The Firewire drive has all the space we need for a few more years 🙂🙂.

The important thing with me now is to transfer my own iTunes library ( 80 Gb total, 51 Gb music stored on an external drive ) and all the playlists and playcounts to open in iTunes on the Firewire drive. With my Firevault password forgotten from Snow Leopard cannot use Migration Assistant. Will try to drag and drop into another external hard drive, hoping the library file which contains the playlists does not get damaged in the process ( had issues with this before 😝 lost 18 months of playcounts and all the playlists in Feb 2009 ). I have many playlists. Then again with my partner's iTunes library, which is still on the internal hard drive, but again the Firevault password not known will again drag and drop with the help of an external hard drive.

Guess I am the first one to do this, with Lion, and to run it in a Firewire drive ( 2 Tb ) Will keep us informed of my progress.

About my MacBook pro, that issue was solved, on start-up today. I opened it while Lion was downloading in my iMac, and the hard drive space had increased. IPhoto was responding after a minor hiccup 🙂. Maybe it takes a day or two or three for a computer to show in the finder the spare hard drive space has increased after securely emptying the trash, rather than on the same day after re-starting the computer 😁😁.

john5801 Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 17, 2011 4:12 AM in response to john5801

Now am working today to move my own iTunes library from the iTunes folder in my internal hard drive, to the ( now empty ) iTunes folder in the external Firewire hard drive. Got to retain all the Megadata while doing this. This means getting it right in the library files 😉. And which ones ? Got 4 files here, two do not matter (iTunes Extras and Genius files extension .itdb) ....seems the important are the iTunes library file and the iTunes library.xml file.

I might have to replace the file paths in the .xml library file. This way have to open it in TextEdit then find the original path, then replace with the new file path, says a video found on the web via Google search. Another video on YouTube says just copy the iTunes library database file and the .xml file just copy over as back-up, and the megadata will be retained, without having to hack into the .xml file. Am ready to go and find out now.

john5801 Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 17, 2011 10:24 AM in response to john5801

I dragged and dropped all the files and folders in my iTunes folder, including the library files. After copying onto the external hard drive, then again into the iTunes folder in the Firewire drive's Lion, it seemed hey presto ! All playlists, ratings and playcounts were showing.

I soon connected an iPod Nano, and a window came up "not all songs were copied onto this iPod because they cannot be found". Trying to double-click a song, then got another window saying a password was needed for "sparsebundle" and my name. I entered the administrator's password and was told to try again. The only way out was to click cancel. 😝😝

Fortunately, after quitting iTunes and booting back into the internal drive, I logged in and opened up iTunes there. The library was still the same, syncing the same iPod without trouble. I disconnected the iPod played 3 songs, and synced it again, and checked the playlist "Recently Played" there was no problems 🙂

Will close this discussion and re-locate it to the iTunes section 😕

Can I clone and transfer from the internal hard drive to an external hard drive ?