What Would Be The Best Way? Copying HDD's Questions & Suggestions...

[SamIchi]

Ok Here the situation. I bought a MB stock about 3-4 weeks ago... I think it's been that long, whenever the new MB's came out. Anyways, when I sold my old eMac, I made a bootable copy onto my external (about 150GB worth of stuff). So now I've been using my MB for about 3 weeks and I've got most of the apps, and preferences I want on it (Shirra, Adium, Growl, etc...) which is about 50GB. So now I've bought a 120GB HDD.

I want to copy my current one onto the 120GB but I can't make a copy onto the external cause I already have one bootable on there.

What's the point of making a "Disk Image Copy"? Would that make a bootable copy of my current HDD onto my external without deleting my old one?

If that's not an option I would have to burn everything onto DVD's which would not be desired.

 

[frankblundt]

Does the second copy have to be bootable per se?
If it's just for backup you could look at an app like Xupport, which will let you make a backup of your system as an Apple Restore image. AFAIK, if you need to reinstall, you can boot off the system DVD, and restore to the HD from the image in Disk Utility. (I've not actually tried this myself...)

Unless you use a utility that lets you repartition the drive without erasing it first (Disk Utilty won't do it - and last time i looked those that would were expensive), I can't see how else to get two OSX systems onto one partition.

 

[SamIchi]

Does the second copy have to be bootable per se?
If it's just for backup you could look at an app like Xupport, which will let you make a backup of your system as an Apple Restore image. AFAIK, if you need to reinstall, you can boot off the system DVD, and restore to the HD from the image in Disk Utility. (I've not actually tried this myself...)

Unless you use a utility that lets you repartition the drive without erasing it first (Disk Utilty won't do it - and last time i looked those that would were expensive), I can't see how else to get two OSX systems onto one partition.

No I don't need this copy to be bootable, but I want to copy this into HD onto the new one without doing too much uneccesary work. Could I just use Disk Utility for that? Make a Disk Image? I'm new to that stuff, so I thought I'd ask first.