Reconfiguration of drives using SD?

[peterm1]

Hi. I am running a Mac Pro on Leopard, and have the following drives in my drive bays:

Bay 1: Original 235GB hard drive that came with the computer with the OS and applications on it. I am starting to outgrow this drive and want to migrate to a 500GB drive.

Bay 2: A Maxtor 500GB drive divided into two 250GB partitions. One partition is exclusively for my SD backup (all files are copied from the main hard drive in Bay 1 each night), and the other partition is for my Time Machine backup. What I would like to do is erase the Time Machine partition and use the whole 500GB drive as my main hard drive with the OS, applications, etc. I would then put a new 500GB drive in Bay 1 to replace the original 235GB drive that came with the computer, and would use this new 500GB drive in Bay 1 as my SD backup drive.

I imagine the above shouldn't be too hard to accomplish, but can someone help guide me through the steps? I am ok with deleting the Time Machine backups on my partitioned drive and restarting fresh with an external wireless Apple drive just for Time Machine. Is it easy to delete the Time Machine partition and get the rest of the space back on the drive in Bay 2 so I would now have 500GB available? How about switching my main bootable drive with applications from the original 235GB drive to the Maxtor drive in Bay 2, which should already have the same files on it since it was my SD backup drive? How do I do this?

Finally, I have Maxtor 500GB drives in Bays 3 and 4 which I am using solely to store photos in a RAID configuration (I thought I would mention this although I don't plan on doing anything with these drives at this point).

Thanks!

Peter

[dnanian]

Well, you'd first turn off Time Machine, then use Disk Utility to repartition that drive into one large 500GB partition, using the "GUID" partition scheme.

Then, use SD! to "Backup - all files" from the current startup drive to this new one. Once done, rename it to the SAME name as the original drive and then start up from it using the Startup Disk preference pane. You can then do what you want with the original startup drive.