Clone Leopard HD using SD 2.5 from Tiger

[Mactavish]

Since 2.5 is so new, there are so many posts, sorry if this was covered.

My first clone was NG, booted but did not really work properly, missing desktop icons etc. I realized that since I do my clones at bedtime, that the system maintence late night auto schedule deleted cache files while SD 2.5 was working. So I thought it might be smart to run SD from a separate HD and to a clone that way. So I ran SD 2.5 from Tiger INTEL 10.4.11, Backup ALL, chose my Leopard 10.5.2 HD as source, and target was a fresh HD. ALL drives in MacPRO Tower are GUID formatted. The ACL option in the Tiger booted version of SD 2.5 is greyed out FWIW.

This clone was NG, so I tried again, booted from my Leopard 10.5.2 HD, ran SD 2.5, and cloned to same internal HD. ACL is checked ON, in advanced options, this Clone WORKED and booted.

That's the background, question therefore is, do we have to run SD 2.5 from a booted Leopard HD, for a proper Leopard clone? I thought that just like programs like DiskWarrior, it would be better to boot from a separate system to do the clone since the systems being accessed and copied would not be "active". I can do more tests if you wish.

Thanks.

[dnanian]

You cannot copy Leopard from a Tiger install. It must be done from leopard.

[Mactavish]

Originally Posted by dnanian

You cannot copy Leopard from a Tiger install. It must be done from leopard.

Well, that confirms my findings, and I THANK YOU. So as a followup, if I want to do a Leopard Clone, and not have the system I am cloning being "active/live", and running, then I assume I would have to have a total of 3 hard drives to do this.

1) The Leopard HD, I want to clone
2) A Leopard booted HD, with SuperDuper 2.5, to run SD
3) A 3rd HD for the TARGET clone itself.

Or just run SuperDuper from the SOURCE HD and roll the dice in the middle of the night when system caches get moved or deleted. This only happened once to me last week, and I quickly did a Smart Update to the overnighted clone, and the desktop icons came back, as they are part of one of the caches I saw in the trash. I did re-read the entire manual, but did not see anything related to Tiger and Leopard startup drives and running SD 2.5. I would assume there are still many that like me, can run a Tiger SD 2.5 version as well as a Leopard SD 2.5, so keep this in mind for the next version of the manual. I know SD 2.5 just came out, so I hope this is helpful to you and other users.

[dnanian]

In general, copying a running system should be fine. I don't really know why your desktop would be messed up on startup -- but it's possible that all you needed was a "Launch Services" rebuild...

[Mactavish]

Originally Posted by dnanian

In general, copying a running system should be fine. I don't really know why your desktop would be messed up on startup -- but it's possible that all you needed was a "Launch Services" rebuild...

thanks, did NOT know about the LS rebuild at the time, but a quick "smart update" put all the desktop icons back. I believe the icon cache as well as the other routine cleaning caches were in the trash when I opened the clone, as I do them late at night. I'll write back if I see the issue again.

[dnanian]

OK, sounds good.