Cloning my HDD

I've decided I want to pull the 'ol switcheroo. My iBook G4 has Leopard on it, and my external has Tiger. I'd like that to be reversed, as in clone my HDD to the external (shouldn't be too hard) But my question is, would it be possible to format my iBook's HDD and clone the external to it? Would it be bootable?

Sorry if that wasn't really clear, I hope you get the gist of it.

Thanks!

You can use SuperDuper! to clone a drive. I cloned my MBP's HD to a mini external I have, and I was able to boot from it. You just have to make sure the external is formatted correctly, as I explained here

To clarify, clone your HD to your external using SuperDuper!, then boot from said external (maybe partition the external into 2 drives if you can, one for leopard and one for tiger) and clone the tiger part to the HD. I think that should do what you want, I've never tried something like that before. If thats not what you wanted let me know.

eliehass said:

To clarify, clone your HD to your external using SuperDuper!, then boot from said external (maybe partition the external into 2 drives if you can, one for leopard and one for tiger) and clone the tiger part to the HD. I think that should do what you want, I've never tried something like that before. If thats not what you wanted let me know.

Click to expand...

Thanks, the Tiger partition is actually coming from an old iBook G3 I have that is dying, and I didn't want to lose Tiger, so I cloned it's hard drive onto my external. I've been increasingly frusterated with Leopard lately, so I decided to clone my iBook G4's HDD (Which is running Leopard) onto the external, then take the Tiger partition I had earlier, and put it on the iBook G4, if that makes sense. The Leopard partition will be booted as needed, and the old iBook G3 will run Ubuntu 'til the end of its days.

Starting to clone now, wish me luck.

PinkLemonade said:

I've decided I want to pull the 'ol switcheroo. My iBook G4 has Leopard on it, and my external has Tiger. I'd like that to be reversed, as in clone my HDD to the external (shouldn't be too hard) But my question is, would it be possible to format my iBook's HDD and clone the external to it? Would it be bootable?

Sorry if that wasn't really clear, I hope you get the gist of it.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

If your external is Firewire, you're good to go. You need to be able to boot off it. Carbon Copy cloner will also get the job done.

-Nick

fiveightandten said:

If your external is Firewire, you're good to go. You need to be able to boot off it. Carbon Copy cloner will also get the job done.

-Nick

Click to expand...

You can boot off of USB 2.0 as well. I did it myself last night. (It's possible this only applies to the intel macs)

fiveightandten said:

If your external is Firewire, you're good to go. You need to be able to boot off it. Carbon Copy cloner will also get the job done.

-Nick

Click to expand...

It is FireWire, I'm glad too, USB is sloooooooow.

Thanks for the info!

good luck and let us know how it goes!

I always wanted a firewire 800 external, but they are sooo hard to find and expensive! I am kind of upset that ipods don't support firewire 800, being as apple includes it standard in all of their computers...

eliehass said:

good luck and let us know how it goes!

I always wanted a firewire 800 external, but they are sooo hard to find and expensive! I am kind of upset that ipods don't support firewire 800, being as apple includes it standard in all of their computers...

Click to expand...

Well, it worked, I'm using my iBook on Tiger right now.

One thing is a little weird though. When I was booting from my external drive, it worked flawlessly. Nothing went wrong. Now, as soon as I put it on my iBook's HDD, I suddenly have the infamous 10.4.10 wireless problem. I updated to 10.4.11, but no change at all. Why exactly did that happen, and how can I fix it?

thats odd, are you sure you didn't have the issue running from your external or did you just not run it long enough from the external to encounter it?

If it's possible maybe try the transfer again? I'm really not sure, sorry...

Well it hasn't dropped the signal for 15 minutes or so now, maybe it fixed itself?

Anyway, I'm sure it wasn't present running off the external. I ran it for about an hour with no problems. I put it on here, within 20 minutes, it drops the signal. Then regains it. Just to drop it a minute later.

But like I said, it hasn't happened lately, so we'll see.

OK, it's not as bad as it was before, but now every 20 minutes or so, it drops it for a time period of 1 to 10 seconds, then picks it up again. I know I have a signal, I've used my iBook here at least 10 times before.

I could deal with it if I had to, but a fix would really be appreciated.