Need to Re-format my internal drive...

[Tim White]

My apologies if all this has been covered before, but I just wanted a little confirmation on how to perform a disaster recovery before I do anything too stupid.

I need to re-format the internal hard drive in my macbook pro (intel C2D) to change its filesystem (its a long story). To now, I have been using a paid copy of SD to write backups to an external HD (firewire connected). The internal drive is called "Macintosh HD" and the external is called "Backup" (and Macintosh HD2, it's partitioned). I have tested booting from the external SD backup drive by holding "option" down at boot time, and all is good.

The steps I intend to be perform are as follows;

1. Rename external drive to "Macintosh HD" (same as internal drive - after reading some other threads on these forums).

2. Boot from External "Macintosh HD".

3. Use disk utility (residing on external "Macintosh HD" that I booted from) to reformat internal HD using default filesystem.

4. Restore from external Macintosh HD to internal Macintosh HD using restore functionality in disk utility.

I decided not to boot from DVD in case the version of disk utility on there is bad as per another thread. Can I really get away without booting from DVD? Is there anything else I need to be careful of? Any gotchyas or words of wisdom?

[dnanian]

You don't have to use Disk Utility if you've started up from the backup. Why not just use SD?

[Tim White]

Thanks Dave. I'll use SD for step 4. I'm planning to do this work later today, so I'll post a reply with the result. Sorry if I seem a little over-cautious it's just I've got a ton of stuff on the Macbook Pro that I don't want to lose. I'm a recent switcher to Mac land so this is my first time doing major surgery.

[dnanian]

No problem at all, Tim. Always better to be sure.

[Tim White]

OK, I got the job done - as per the plan. Worked flawlessly. No issues or problems - took about 40 minutes from start to finish. Doing this type of operation on a Windows machine would have been a major pain!

Just for the record, there are a number of applications that do not work you try to install them on the Mac OSX Extended (case sensitive) filesystem. Photoshop CS3 and Civilization IV were the ones that I found. Debugging the problem with CS3 was easy, but Civ IV just failed to initialize. Moral of the story is - don't take advice from work colleagues who mean well, but don't necessarily know what they are talking about. When my Mac was new, he said to change the filesystem to case sensitive for better compatibility with open source software. Don't do it. Just leave the defaults in place.

Thanks for your help, I'm glad I paid for your product and won't hesitate to recommend it to others.

[dnanian]

Thanks, Tim! I had another user earlier today who had a similar problem -- definitely don't use case sensitive unless you really have to...