Macbook external drive restore

[cromestant]

In my old powerbook g4 I was able to do a restore to an external firewire harddrive and then boot from that external hardrive.

I now have a macbook and a lacie 500gb external hard drive, and want to do the same thing.

So i try it the old fashionedway and even though i can see the hard drive on boot time, i cant boot from it, unplug restart and google...

now I read everywhere that partition has to be GUID GPT whatnot.. so I open disk utility again and this time create the proper partition, redo the restore from internal hard drive to external , wait... eat a sandwich , then... i come back and its done, I check in the system preferences to see if external drive is seen as a boot device, and it is... so reboot and still nothing.

Some people claim that they have gotten this to work, i have not... please advice all you gurus out there.

Thanks

Charles

 

[aristobrat]

If nobody can explain the technical way on how to do it, you can cheat and use SuperDuper! like I do.

 

[cromestant]

hmm nice, I was thinking about it, but I do have one question, does this really work?????

Can you boot from the image?

although I dont really understand why macos's disk utility does not do this the "easy" way, its macos... shouldn't it still be K.I.S.S??

and even more considering the fact that in ppc it does work, sure there are some major changes in the system ( EFI, GPT partition etc...) but come on, at least let usknow there is a flaw in this, on an apple support page i read "doesnot quitework... dont do it :s:S:S:S:S:S)...

well please tell me how superduper works and ill consider it as an alternative.


thanks

 

[aristobrat]

I have no idea how SuperDuper! does it, but yes, it works. In the last 2 weeks, I've done it at least 5x (dicking around w/ Vista) where I set SuperDuper! up to backup my Macintosh HD to my external drive and reboot off of the external drive when it's done.

SuperDuper! doesn't do anything magic, so someone who knows more about booting extenrally than I should be able to tell you how to do this yourself in OS X.