S
smarsquid
Guest
I have little experience with Macs, but my mother in law needs me to fix a problem for her. It is urgent because she uses the system to run her business, and right now the system is nearly unusable.
OS 9.1 is reporting hard drive errors. You can copy files from the drive, but cannot save anything to it. I have tried a few 3rd party disk utilities (including Disk Warrior), and they are unable to address the problem. There isn't enough time to continue trying; what I need now is to ditch the old hard drive. But, reinstalling the OS and all software on a new drive is not an option. Too disruptive, too time consuming and would make my mother in law a nervous wreck. My hope is that I can attach a fresh new drive as slave in the system, boot into OS 9.1 and then drag and drop all the files/folders from the system disk onto the new hard drive. Then I will detach the old problem drive and reconnect the new drive (which will hopefully mirror the old system drive) as master. Will the new hard drive be bootable and operate just like the old one if I do this? I desparately need step by step instruction on how to pull this off and to swiftly normalize everything. I realize there is some chance that the problems she is having now may carry over to the new drive (meaning the problem is software/OS chaos and not the drive itself), but I'm willing to give it a shot anyway.
I plan on attaching the new unformatted drive and then booting the OS 9.1 CD. I assume that on the boot CD there is a utility with which I can format and partition the new drive. Then, once booted into OS 9.1 on the problem drive, I will open the drives contents using the icon on the desktop and drag/drop everything to the new hard drive. I read somewhere about using Finder when doing this. Is this necessary? Why is it differerent from what I just described doing? I do not even know what Finder is.
OS 9.1 is reporting hard drive errors. You can copy files from the drive, but cannot save anything to it. I have tried a few 3rd party disk utilities (including Disk Warrior), and they are unable to address the problem. There isn't enough time to continue trying; what I need now is to ditch the old hard drive. But, reinstalling the OS and all software on a new drive is not an option. Too disruptive, too time consuming and would make my mother in law a nervous wreck. My hope is that I can attach a fresh new drive as slave in the system, boot into OS 9.1 and then drag and drop all the files/folders from the system disk onto the new hard drive. Then I will detach the old problem drive and reconnect the new drive (which will hopefully mirror the old system drive) as master. Will the new hard drive be bootable and operate just like the old one if I do this? I desparately need step by step instruction on how to pull this off and to swiftly normalize everything. I realize there is some chance that the problems she is having now may carry over to the new drive (meaning the problem is software/OS chaos and not the drive itself), but I'm willing to give it a shot anyway.
I plan on attaching the new unformatted drive and then booting the OS 9.1 CD. I assume that on the boot CD there is a utility with which I can format and partition the new drive. Then, once booted into OS 9.1 on the problem drive, I will open the drives contents using the icon on the desktop and drag/drop everything to the new hard drive. I read somewhere about using Finder when doing this. Is this necessary? Why is it differerent from what I just described doing? I do not even know what Finder is.
