Copy the WHOLE HD?

[iEric]

I want to get a new HD but I dont want a second one, so can I just make an image from disk copy of all the stuff i have on the Hard Drive, and then unpack the image to the new HD? And then just remove the old HD from the system? Does that work?
How should I go about doing this?

 

[wordmunger]

If you have a DP G4 (according to your profile), there should be slots for two hard drives. Why not keep the old one? Do you have a new use for it?

If you have an iMac/laptop, there's only room for one HD. You could burn your home folder to a DVD, then reinstall all the apps/system on the new HD. Or you could do what I did to upgrade my TiBook. I bought an external FW enclosure, used Carbon Copy Cloner to make an exact copy of my old HD on the new one, then installed the new HD. I took my old HD and popped it into my Rev A iBook, and now I use the old 3-Gig iBook drive in the enclosure for backups.

 

[dudeami]

As long as your Mac can access both of the hard drives at the same time, I would recommend using carbon copy cloner to copy your hard drive. You can run this while you are booted to the original hard drive. Use carbon copy cloner to copy everything to the new hard drive. When it is done, change your startup disk and reboot. If everything looks in order, you can take out the old hard drive.

Note: I would recommend running the disk utility to repair permissions before copy the hard drive. I would also run the repair permissions again on the new hard drive when after you have booted to it.

I have used Carbon Copy Cloner many times without any issues. It works like a champ.

Here is a link, and the price is right

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html