Installing New Hard Drive on MacPro

I recently installed a new 3TB hard drive in my mac pro. Copied everything with Super Duper and moved it into slot 1 and placed my old Drive in slot 2. Ideally I would like to erase the old drive and use it primarily for Time Machine.

Can someone offer any suggestions or steps if I have completed this correctly? Or, if anyone has any better advice.

Thank you for your help.

Sounds like you are on the right track. There are two things I would suggest before erasing the old drive.

!. Reboot the Mac and make sure it's booting from the new drive. Cloning with Duper Duper or Carbon Copy Cleaner is pretty straightforward but does bork up from time to time. Trust me you want to discover problems before erasing the old drive.

2. If step one works go to System Preferences and use the Startup Disk pane to set startup to the new disk.

BTW if you are using Super Duper with 10.7 (Lion) or 10.8 (Mountain Lion) it does not clone the recovery partition If tn the event of drive failure Time machine backups are not "bootable" even if the system files have been copied by Time Machine. If the old drive is large enough consider installing a minimal copy of the OS on the old drive then designate the rest for backup. In an emergency the TM backup os now bootable.

Thanks for the advice Sly. Greatly appreciated.

It is booting up. I'll work on the other suggestions next.

Sounds like you are well on the way. Let us know how it goes.

BTW Just out of curiosity which Mac Pro do you have? My 2006 machine just croaked a few days ago. O am going to wait a bit and see if new models are announced before replacing it.

Hey Sly,
It went well until I called Apple asked if there was anything else I could do. Apple said Mountain Lion, I said ok. Big mistake. Some of the programs were not compatible and that caused even more problems. So... long story short, I used Time Machine and now I'm happily back with Snow Leopard. (painful haha)

I have an earlier 2009 Mac Pro that I'm trying to figure out what else I can do to make it run fast, but that's my next project.

Here are the specs in case you have any thoughts.

Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro4,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 12 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MP41.0081.B07
SMC Version (system): 1.39f5
SMC Version (processor tray): 1.39f5

An SSD from OWC is the biggest boost you can give your Mac Pro.

Sweeeet. Thanks for the heads up Harry. I'll check them out.

Here is a tip about OS, Usually you are safe upgrade up 1 version of the OS after purchasing software. What usually happens is people are a few versions back on software and OS and they try to do an OS upgrade. Also, you should check compatibility before upgrading. I had the same issue with Lion, I upgraded while on vacation and found out a few minutes after that Parallels Desktop was not supported, I have to find a patch to make it work, I had no option to roll back because I was not at home.

Also, tip for installing a new hard drive, the best method I have found to image the hard drive from one to another when installing a new one is using disc utility, if you go to the backup section, just choose the source and destination and go. It sometimes is faster, but it always makes a better copy and will get the recovery partition, also it comes free on every mac os x installer disc and recovery partition.

Thanks for the additional comments Rusty.

Dropping back to my original OS was the least stressful route. I use Daylite for contact management and that started acting funky as well.

I am back to normal. Bells and whistles sound better from far away.