Can I Clone My Hardrive to an External Drive Already Containing Files On IT?

[mosk]

[FONT=Georgia]hi, i would appreciate your help. Currently i have an ibook g3 with a 250gig Lacie Extreme External Drive. The Thing is, It already had files on it which i need to keep. I tried using lacie silver lining to copy files but gave up as i went from error to error(73 and 50). I just got a new G4 powerbook and I wanted to be able to copy some of my existing program applications and files so i can upload them to my new mac. my ibooks optical drive doesn't work so i can neither make copied or otherwise use the cd-rw. I am not sure if i need to partition the external drive in order to complete the cloning operation Nor If I can do so without lloosing anything. I need it for work so it's important nothing be lost or corrupted. Can I partition the lacie even though it already has stuff on it? And if I need to partion it (which I am not sure i can do) How do i do this? Or does the drive have to be Clean with nothing on it?? Thanks in advance for all and any advise. I love My Macs but I only learned to use them recently so I'm kind of a Newbie and i have never done anything like this before!

[dnanian]

I don't know what your external drive is formatted as, "mosk", but if it's HFS+ you can follow the steps in the User's Guide in the section "Storing a backup alongside other files on a destination drive". It's pretty clear, so I don't think you'll have any problems.

[mosk]

thanks i will try to determine what that is maybe under about this mac it will tell me. Much appreciate your helping me out! i will let you know how it goes.

[dnanian]

Check using "Get Info" in Finder when the drive is selected, mosk, or use Disk Utility to check...