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Old 05-22-2008, 11:59 AM
montag montag is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Laguna Niguel, CA
Posts: 3
Backup a currently existing MBP drive to a fresh drive with SD?

Here's the situation: a new hard drive is coming in the mail for my Macbook Pro. It's also coming with an external enclosure, and my plan is to swap out the old hard drive, use it as a little USB-powered drive inside the enclosure, and install the new, larger one into the MBP.

I'd like to copy the contents of my 100 GB old hard drive (Leopard) to the new 200 GB one. Normally, I'd just restore from my Time Machine backup, but that happens to be across the country for the moment.

I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to do this swap before I have access to my TM backup again. Here are a couple solutions I thought of, and I wanted to know if SD could handle it.

1) Attach the 200 GB drive via the enclosure to my MBP. Do a restore of the current hard drive to the 200 GB drive. Swap hard drives. Boot normally.

2) Swap the hard drives, boot from the 100 GB in the enclosure (unlikely), and do the same thing.

3) Find a Leopard install disk. Swap the drives. Install Leopard on the 200 GB. Boot to fresh Leopard, install SD, and restore from the 100 GB attached to the enclosure to the 200 GB in the MBP. (Don't think this is possible, since I shouldn't be able to restore to a drive I'm currently running.)

Worst-case scenario, I can just wait until I head back and have access to my TM backup or a large external to do a SD backup. (There's always purchasing one, using it for a backup, and returning it the same day.) However, I'd love to know if any of my ideas are possible with SD or if you have any other ideas.

Here's the hardware, since I know chipset and other factors of the external drive affect bootability:
- Nippon Labs EN-25SATA 2.5" USB 2.0 External Enclosure
- Seagate Momentus 7200.2 ST9200420AS 200GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Notebook Hard Drive
- Current MBP drive: Fujitsu MHV2100BH 100GB Notebook Hard Drive
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