Transfer System to New Drive?

[fivestringer]

I've got what I hope is a problem with a simple solution.

I've got a 3-year old PowerPC G5 with 2 - 320 gb drives. Everything is working fine for now.

I want to buy a new 1 TB drive and transfer all my system stuff to it. My problem is that I don't know the best/easiest way to do this.

Can I replace my existing second drive with the new, bigger one and use S/D to make a bootable image on the new drive, then swap out the existing main drive with the new one? That seems too simple to work.

I also have a 500 gb external FW drive. If the first method won't work, can I make a bootable image on the FW drive, swap out the old main drive with the new one, then transfer the image to the new drive? If so, what happens when I power on the system with the new, unformatted drive?

As you can probably tell, I'm not real familiar with the inner workings of Macs, so any advice is greatly appreciated.

[dnanian]

Yes: replace one drive with the 1TB drive (assuming the G5 actually supports the TB drive, of course). Partition it as "Apple Partition Map" and format as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" with Disk Utility's "Partition" tab (the partition scheme is in the Options... button).

Use SuperDuper! to "Backup - all files" from the original, using Smart Update or "Erase, then copy". Once done, *rename* the drive to the same name as the original drive, then use the the Startup Disk preference pane in System Preferences to start up from the new drive.

That's it! Note that some "activated" applications (e.g. Photoshop) might need to be re-activated.

[fivestringer]

Many Thanks!!

That sounds almost too easy to be true. I'll let you know how it works.