So: What would you do with your tax refund? I know what I would do.
That’s right, I’m going to try out the lauded, uh, easiness to swap hard drives in the MacBook. A Hitachi Travelstar 5K120 120GB HD has just been ordered since the pre-requisite USB to IDE/SATA adapter arrived today.
Here’s the plan:
- Swap the drives.
- Boot a Mac OS X setup on my iPod.
- Format and partition the new drive.
- Connect the old drive via the USB adapter.
- Copy everything from the old drive to the new drive.
You’ll notice two paths in particular that I don’t plan to go down: I don’t save everything as a disk image or zip file somewhere and I don’t install Mac OS X on the new drive. There are reasons for those.
Saving it as a disk image or zip means that you have to have intermediate space, and saving as a zip in particular means that you’ll have to have double that to uncompress it again (disk images mount in place). Not wanting to install Mac OS X in general is because I don’t want to boot up using the new hard drive. By relying on a third drive, none of the other drives are touched: I can make a bit-by-bit copy with the same permissions, and I don’t need to repartition to gain the new space that I would have by cloning the partition.
This is the way we would do it, except we’d use the Migration Assistant during the initial OS X setup (can also be run after the fact.. it’s in your Utilities folder), because it’s smart and only transfers needed files (not temp files, etc). Another great reason to use Migration Assistant is because it makes sure everything is compatible/will boot. It also makes sure things go smoothly if you are transfering and installation from formerly PPC drive to a new Intel.
By Jesse Endahl · 2006.09.19 04:00
I’ve used the Migration Assistant too, but I won’t use it now, because:
a) I ran it when setting up this MacBook to begin with, and I did have some headaches after using it, and remaining files to transfer.
b) It would mean that I would have to install Mac OS X too, to the best of my knowledge, and in general would preclude a plain bit-by-bit copy.
(Jesse does not suffer from multiple personality disorder most of the time. “We” refers to the Apple Store at which he works.)
By Jesper · 2006.09.19 06:05
I will say that booting OS X (on any OS really) off your iPod sucks. Besides being dog slow it is a good way to anger the not-really-meant-for-such-constant-read-write-usage drive in the iPod.
Migration Assistant is a champ though, at works well for most use cases - perhaps not for your somewhat out of the norm one.
By Shawn Medero · 2006.09.19 17:39
I will say that yes, I know, but I don’t have any other external HD handy for this purpose at this time, and we won’t be doing a lot of reading and writing on the iPod itself while performing the actual copying, even if using the OS constantly would obviously be a pain in the ass as you duly note.
As per previous notes, I really do like Migration Assistant, but it didn’t produce optimal results last time, and I really do want a bit-by-bit copy of the files on the HD which is impossible to do with Migration Assistant since it needs a Mac OS X setup on the HD being copied to.
By Jesper · 2006.09.19 22:20