Cloning to another Mac?

Good morning, all.

I've surfed these threads and read the stickies, and still have a question which may seem pretty simple.

I have a new iMac, running Leopard, which is used for light video editing and graphic design.

I plan to buy an identical rig for my home office, and would like to have the identical HD configuration on the new rig.

I've read about CCC and cloning in general, and get the process. Yet, most of the info involves cloning from machine to external hard drive.

Has anyone cloned from machine to machine?

Thanks for any clarity!

As they are both iMacs of the same type you could put the new iMac in to Target disk mode. You will need a firewire cable for this, but with the new imac showing up as a drive you can simply use Carbon CC to copy the entire set-up over

How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode

agreed with louishen
also, without a firewire cable, if the machine is identical, you can easily just clone your imac with CCC onto a usb external drive, then clone onto the other imac from the external drive.

Huge thanks for the quick replies.

kane: With that method, once I bump the original drive onto the external drive, and then onto the target machine, how do I replace the existing drive on the target with the 'new' drive?

I assume CCC has a mechanism in place?

Gave it a bit of thought, and with identical machines, you can just do a time machine backup.... connect it to your new machine, boot from install disk, choose language and click continue.
Then go to utilities menu and choose restore from time machine backup.
and you're done.

kane fremder said:

Gave it a bit of thought, and with identical machines, you can just do a time machine backup.... connect it to your new machine, boot from install disk, choose language and click continue.
Then go to utilities menu and choose restore from time machine backup.
and you're done.

Click to expand...

On second thought, that will be a slow process.
So, just use CCC to clone a bootable backup (source is Macintosh HD, Destination is external HD).
Boot the new system off the backup holding the option key and in CCC this time source is the external HD and destination is the Macintosh HD.

*depending on your external HD, you may have to format it first using disk utility - mac os extended (journaled)

Epic!

Huge thanks, very helpful.