Restoring from backup to a warranty replacement mid-2009 MacBook Pro.
 

Two months ago I purchased one of the mid-2009 15" MBP's. Lovely.
Just recently a fault in the screen necessitated the return of the machine to Apple.
Prior to sending it in, I made two copies of the HD using SD onto two separate external drives (after booting into safe mode).

When the new machine (not mine, repaired, but a brand new one) arrives tomorrow, it will have Snow Leopard installed on it, rather than Leopard which came on the original machine. I've established that it's a bit early for me to upgrade to Snow Leopard, as several of my most-used apps aren't ready for it yet.

What's the best way for me to get back to what I was running before?

Can I simply boot from one of the external backup HD's, write zeros over the new internal drive, and then clone the contents of the original drive onto it? Or is it more complicated than that? Would I need to use the original 10.5 install discs (yes, I kept them, naughty me - they won't be needing them anymore!) and get the new machine running on 10.5 prior to any cloning?

Any advice would be most appreciated - thanks in advance!

Angus

Well, if you don't want to retain Snow Leopard, yes - you'll just start up from the backup and restore to the internal drive. No real reason to write zeros unless you really want to...