Clone a bootable hard disk the easy way

Apr 04, '07 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: Nimitz

I've got this new Mac mini, and I wanted to clone my old hard disk onto the new mac mini -- noe that this only works with same processor type in both machines. Of course, the first thing that pops into my mind is using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper or rsync or even ditto followed by some blessing. But wait ... I hooked up the old Mac in Target Disk Mode (start it up with the 'T' key held down) with a FireWire cable to the second Mac mini.

So I insert the MacOS X 10.4 install disk, boot from it, select Disk Utility from the Start menu, and choose the volume of the new Mac. I use the Restore tab, drag and drop the old drive as the source, and the new one as the target, and press the button. Et voila! After copying, I can boot the new Mac with an exact clone of the old one. This seems obvious, but I haven't seen it mentioned here before.

[robg adds: This technique may result in some issues if the machines aren't nearly identical -- as a matter of practice, I never clone an old machine's startup drive to a new machine, given that I don't know exactly what changes have been made on the new machine. But if you're setting up a number of identical machines, this could be one way of speeding the process.]

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