Hi Barney-15E,
Yep, I figured out can only partition entire drive & not merely one volume/partition.
You may have solved a riddle for me. You say since my partition on that XHD (External hard drive) is APM, it cannot be used to boot my Mac. I HAVE used it for just that but I was booting the Snow Leopard Clone 10.6.8! You further state it may be since Mountain Lion that GPT is required to boot Mac! So, an apparent contradiction is solved! Since apparently with OS X 10.6x, either APM or GPT were OK, it is possible that CCC instructed me to format as APM. I don’t recall but, I had to have read instructions telling me to use APM as the partition map when I originally set up that XHD to clone my Mac.
And yes, I think I will need a 2nd XHD to be able to do what I wish to do, save my SL & WinXP clones. Then after repartitioning the XHD with GPT, reclone those 2 back & use the empty 3rd to clone Mavericks. Of course, If I had an extra XHD, I could just partition that into 3 (GPT) partitions & use one to clone Mavericks & save the other 2 for some future use. I could leave alone my existing XHD with APM, since I can still boot the SL clone & also the Win XP clone. I would still have that empty partition (APM) but, maybe could use it for something other than a clone since it would not be bootable. Must think about these options.
Keg55, Not sure what you meant by “production SL & Windows.” I have my internal iMac HD which is partitioned & has Mavericks & Windows. I then have an XHD which was partitioned APM into 3 volumes. 2 for SL clones using CCC & 1 for Windows clone using Winclone. Since I updated to Mavericks recently, I no longer needed both SL clones so, I erased one. Leaving one empty volume on that XHD where I was going to clone Mavericks. Then the problem became apparent. Yes, I think I can use part of my internal iMac HD if I were to repartition into 3, making a new empty volume & use THAT to do all this cloning & then when finished, put it back to only 2 partitions, as it is now. Not sure I want to mess with my internal HD rather than purchase another XHD though.
Csound1,
I was unfamiliar with CopycatX. I read about it & it is very interesting. Especially since I think I can copy both my Mac (Snow Leopard & Maverick) clones as well as my Windows XP clone. So, Rather than purchasing both CCC & Winclone, I would only purchase CopyCatX & save ~ $10.00.
Fair price comparison may be CCC $39.95+ Winclone 4: $29.99 cost vs. CopyCat $59.95
50% more $$ vs. CCC but, it can duplicate a drive that has damage & it can backup/duplicate entire drive, including the Windows BootCamp partition.
Does it require that the destination Drive have a GUID (GPT) partition Map?
Or is it irrelevant how the destination drive is formatted?
I need to look into that more. Want to know disadvantages of CopyCatX vs. CCC. Maybe speed of making subsequent updated clones. If I clone my Mavericks weekly, it will be relatively quick using CCC since not a large number of changes & CCC only updates those files that have changed. If I use CopyCatX weekly, will it take a very long time each week? It must copy the entire HD even the empty space. So it copies 500GB for me even if I’m only using 150 GB. What other disadvantages might there be? I suspect CCC is much more popular & wonder why. I’ve read that in order to restore your Mac OS from your CopyCat XHD you need yet another XHD since both destination & source volumes have to be unmounted! I do not believe that is the case if you had to restore your Mac from a CCC created Mac clone on an XHD.
Much to consider.
Regards,
Steve
