Creating a Disk Image of my internal HD

It can take quite a long time using USB. However, what you are doing is really not the best backup solution. Instead you should:

1. Partition the external drive so that one partition is just large enough to hold the entire size of your main hard drive - about 80 GBs.

2. Use Disk Utility's Restore option to clone the main hard drive to the external hard drive partition made in Step 1 above:

a. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder.
b. Select the startup volume from the left side list.
c. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
d. Drag the startup volume to the Source entry field.
e. Select the backup volume from the leftside list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
f. Check the box to Erase Destination. Skip this step if you've already formatted the drive or if you cannot format it.
g. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.

Then use a good backup utility to maintain incremental updates of the backup. I can recommend DejaVu, Synchronize! Pro X, SuperDuper, and Retrospect. All can do both full and incremental backups as well as create and maintain bootable backups.

I would recommend that you switch from a USB enclosure to a Firewire enclosure. You cannot boot a PowerPC Mac from USB, only from Firewire.

For more on backup and restore visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backups.

I noticed the same thing with external USB drives; then I formatted mine using the Mac OS insteand of WinXP and that helped a lot. You might want to see if you can at all get your hands on a FireWire drive because they work even better. After a while you might want to try something like SuperDuper to clone the drive for you. In any event good luck.

It's not the drive but the enclosure. You can switch the drive into a Firewire or FW/USB enclosure without having to buy a whole new drive and enclosure.

It's the enclosure that determines whether the connection port will be Firewire or USB. The actual hard drive is the same regardless of the enclosure.

I guessed I missed where he told us the model of the external drive... I know my miniStack is that way... but I have externals that are just USB... which I now regret...