Hard Drive Upgrade

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Hi everyone, I'm new here but switched to Mac about 4 years ago. I have a Mac Pro 1.1. It had two 500GB internal Hard drives, the secondary of which just died, apparently. (It was not my startup disk, thank goodness.)

I know I have 4 bays inside to place drives in. What I'd like to do is maybe put a TB in each of the four drives with two of them as a RAID for my startup disk, one for a (shhh) Windows partition, and the other for whatever else.

I use OS 10.5 and Time Machine which is backed up onto an external 500 GB drive. I know that if I RAID my startup disk using my existing 500GB startup disk, I will have to format that drive in the process, as well as be limited to a 500GB RAID. So what I want to do is to ditch that drive for a 1TB/1TB RAID drive as my startup, but get all my data from the old startup 500 onto the new RAID, and make that my new startup disk. (Tons of music and photos on the old drive!) Am I making sense?

So how do I do this? Can I use my Time Machine backup after installing new drives and OSX? I'm sure it's quite simple for the Mac veterans, but I want to be sure I don't lose all of my stuff! Thanks in advance for your advice -
Andrew
 

chscag

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Time Machine does not create a bootable backup. It's probably best in your situation to use either SuperDuper (shareware) or Carbon Copy Cloner (donation ware) and clone the 500 GB to the new 1 TB drive prior to setting up the RAID array.

Regards.
 
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Thanks for that info about TM - but am I wrong in thinking that the setting up of the RAID would still just format the 1TB drive again?
 

chscag

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As long as you have a bootable copy of your original 500 GB drive, it won't matter if the RAID setup formats the 1 TB drive. Just boot from the cloned drive and then clone it back to the 1 TB using the same software I suggested to you previously.

Regards.
 

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