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Just a clarification...
Authored by: jiclark on Feb 02, '08 12:34:24PM

There are several posts in this thread that refer to "copying" an installation to another disk, in order to boot from it. You should know that OS X DOES NOT SUPPORT a simple copy of a System installation to another drive. It will not boot. The only way to do it is with a program that knows how to make a copy "bootable". I believe that the only utilities that make it possible are SuperDuper, CarbonCopyCloner and Apple's own Disk Utility.

So unless you're using one of those utilities to clone your working OS X installation to another drive, it's virtually certain that you'll fail. Also, from reading this and another hint on the topic, it sounds like there are two other things that might make some difference:

1) When formatting the drive you want to clone TO, don't check the box labeled "Install OS 9 drivers", and...
2) Make sure you're cloning an installation that is specifically 10.4.6 or newer (and by extension, you might want to make sure the system that you're booted from to do the clone, meets that requirement as well?)

Good luck, and post back when you discover tips or tricks that seem to work for you!



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One more thing...
Authored by: jiclark on Feb 02, '08 12:44:02PM
Even though I highly recommend both SuperDuper and CarbonCopyCloner (and in fact use SD to make bootable external backup drives for client's machines all the time) I thought it prudent to point out that you really shouldn't use either to clone a hard drive from an old machine to use in a new machine if the new machine is not of the same processor family as the old one!

In other words, it can be dangerous to think that an installation created for a PPC machine will work fine in an Intel one. Best to do a clean install, then copy your data over manually.

Hope that makes sense!

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