An embarassing question
 

Going through a major upgrade of my trusty old AGP Sawtooth...Though I still haven't filled my original 10GB hard drive I've purchased an 80 GB Serial ATA drive. What I want to do is move the entire contents of my current drive to the new one.

I'm assuming if I do a straight back-up, that my new drive will be bootable and I would just change to this disk under Start-Up Disk preference panel. Basically I would have no use for the 10GB drive (I would do future safety clones onto a bootable firewire drive)

Do I need to do the "sudo rm /var/db/volinfo.database" command mentioned in the FAQ first? I am in 10.4.1 right now

Is there anything else I need to know?

and finally would wiping the original 10GB drive clean get me in any trouble?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

No questions are embarrassing -- only the ones that aren't asked and end in disaster! So, please -- ask away!

So... a few things. You must have installed a SATA board into the machine, because the Sawtooth doesn't support SATA drives natively. I do *not* know if it's possible for a Sawtooth machine to boot from SATA, so do NOT assume and erase anything until you've booted from the drive and have verified that everything is OK.

But -- yes. If you do "Backup - all files" you *should* be able to just select it and boot from it, if it's supported.

I'd also name the drive the same as the original boot drive. You can differentiate by size -- this'll ensure that aliases resolve as expected.

No need to remove the volinfo.database unless you run into the problem listed. (But thanks for *reading* the FAQ!)

Thanks for asking before, too -- hopefully all this sounds reasonable.

Well the drive and the controller card will arrive Friday morning so I haven't done the install yet. I'm just trying to get my ducks in a row....

Looking at OWC's website the description of the card says this

"Can be used as the boot controller when a bootable hard disk drive is attached"

I'm going to assume my disk drive will count as "bootable" (Hitachi 3.5" 80 GB)

So I'm feeling OK. Thanks for the suggestion about keeping the same disk name though...wouldn't have thought of that

Lastly, I very much appreciate the quick reply. I registered Super Duper earlier this week and it looks like I picked a fine company to do business with. Thanks

Just make sure you check, is all!

Glad to help, though. Let us know how it works out.