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dzevans
02-21-2005, 05:25 PM
Greetings!

I have a PowerMac G4 with MacOS 10.3.8, and my startup disk is rather small (40 gb as I recall). It's almost completely filled up with apps, photos, music, etc. So I am planning on purchasing a larger HD, and installing that as the startup disk. Here's what I want to do:

- Clone absolutely *everything* on my current Macintosh HD to a new drive
- Name the new startup disk the same as the old one ("Macintosh HD")
- Take out the old (small) startup disk, boot up from the new one, and have everything work magically and happily

Is it fairly reasonable to expect to be able to do this? Will SuperDuper be able to do these things for me without too much trial and error? I'm a pretty tech savvy guy, but fiddling around with startup disks is not something I've had to do before, so I want to make sure I do it right.

Any advice and comments are greatly appreciated!

dnanian
02-21-2005, 05:29 PM
Yes -- this shouldn't be a problem at all!

Check out the Appendix in the User's Guide: it goes through the process of repartitioning -- with a full clone -- in some detail. You'll do the same, without the partitioning. It's really not too hard. Just make sure you name the disk the same, as you said, and make sure everything looks good before you dump that old drive.

Good luck -- let us know how it works out!

dzevans
02-21-2005, 05:39 PM
Thanks for the info! I'm hoping to have a new drive next week, and I'll try the full clone as soon as possible. I'll report back with how it goes.

cheers,
Zach

mikel
02-22-2005, 06:28 PM
Sorry if this is an elementary question...

But in the manual and here it is stongly suggested that the new drive to be used as the startup drive be given the same name as the one that WAS used previously.

Why is that?

dnanian
02-22-2005, 06:45 PM
Because applications often store references to files and folders as "aliases", and aliases have the volume name encoded in them. If you don't name a clone the same as the original, and boot from it when the volume named the original name is available, the alias will resolve to that volume rather than the clone. That's probably not what you want!

mikel
02-22-2005, 07:52 PM
OK - great info, thanks!

sjk
02-27-2005, 05:05 PM
Is it also possible that after booting a cloned volume with the same name as an original volume that's online, then booting the original volume again while the same-named clone is online, data might be unintentionally referenced on the cloned volume instead of the original volume? (whew!)

dnanian
02-27-2005, 05:15 PM
I don't think so, no -- again, aliases will resolve preferentially to the first-named drive, which will be the boot volume.

sjk
02-27-2005, 07:17 PM
Thanks, Dave.