Prepairing a used drive for Firewire

[MMM]

This is a two part question. Tomorrow we'll be setting up a Firewire enclosure for use as our main boot drive. We'll be using a miniStack with a used hard drive. Before we copy anything over to it we want to clean the data off of the used drive and reset it to like new condition. I think you do this by recoding 1s and 0s on the drive. Does SuperDuper have any tools to do this, or should we use another method?

Question 2; Are there any hidden files that we need to worry about when we copy the data over to the Firewire drive? Will all boot information be copied over by SuperDuper? Thanks

[dnanian]

Hi, MMM.

1. No, don't use SD! for this. Use Disk Utility, and you can elect to zero the drive.

2. No, nothing you need to worry about; we do the worrying for you.

[MMM]

Thanks for the quick reply Dave! Disk Utility is exactly what we're looking for to zero out the hard drive. I can't wait to use it and SuperDuper tomorrow. Thanks again :D

[dnanian]

Happy to help, MMM. Let us know how it works out.

[MMM]

We're using Filevault and noticed in the instructions that it says:

If you’re using FileVault, you should create a non-FileVault account for use with SuperDuper! Then, log out of your FileVaulted account, into
this new account, and run SuperDuper! from there.

What do you mean by "non-FileVault account"? Are you saying to just create a new user account in System Prefs > System > Accounts and run SuperDuper from there, instead of the Administrator account?

And do we need to do this everytime that we back up our hard drive, or just the first time that we do the back up?

Thanks.

[dnanian]

By "non-FileVault" account, I mean a new account that does not have its Home folder FileVaulted, yes.

And you need to do it every time... otherwise, you could have FileVault issues on the backup.

[MMM]

Hi Dave, we tried to create a new user and then make the backup with SuperDuper, but under the new user account SuperDuper just comes up as 'Unregistered' :( Will it let us use the administrators registration information?

Also, do we need to give the new user Administrator privileges for it to work correctly with FileVault?

We tested SuperDuper and it seems to have froze up for around 7 minutes. In fact it didn't respond or do anything until we clicked on 'Stop' and then it started working. Is this normal?

[dnanian]

Just use the same registration information you used for the original version. It's no problem to run from a non-Admin account, but you need to authenticate from an admin. (If it's unlocked, it's already authenticated.)

Regarding it "freezing" for 7 minutes, it was probably copying the FileVault volume, which is typically very large.