Setting up an External Hard Drive

I have had some problems with my sons imac G4 (OSX 10.4), which have (for the moment) been solved by Disk Warrior. However, we suspect the resident HD may not be stable, so want to connect an external HD. We Plan to clone the resident HD onto the external (into one partition, using the rest for normal back ups), in case the resident drive fails again.

I already had an 80GB HD so I've bought an Icy Box USB 2/Firewire casing for it. I need to know:
1. what is the best (cheap would be good too!) software to use for cloning ?
2. how to set it all up properly please (jumper settings on the ext. HD etc.)?
3. will the cloned HD be bootable in the event of a 'resident' failure?

Any help will be much appreciated.

I would use Superduper!

It will clone your harddrive onto the external and make it bootable (firewire) for free.

It has additional features that are shareware, but for what you need to do it is free and tests have shown it is the most reliable.

(Note: I am not affiliated with the software in any way, just a happy customer)

SuperDuper!'s great. If you want to back up regularly the small fee is worth paying. I back up my entire hard drive once a week using SuperDuper!. It takes about four minutes. On a daily basis I sync my documents folder to a 2gb pen drive using Chronosync.

Cheers, sounds like SD's the one to use then.

Any advice on how to set up the HD? Do the jumper settings matter (the case says to set it to master?)? What about formatting, will I be prompted/told how to do that by OSX?

In the absence of alternative suggestions, I have set the jumper on the external HD to Master, connected the drive and formatted it (setting zeros as well, whatever that means - read in another thread that I should do that). I selected Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Now I want to partition the drive but it is saying that, to create a volume that will boot, I need to install OS9 Drivers. However, the resident drive that I want to clone (have downloaded SuperDuper), is OSX 10.4, so do I untick the box referring to the OS9 Drivers?

Would really appreciate some guidance here please?

It can't hurt to install the OS9 drivers... but I don't think it really matters either way as SuperDuper erases everything again anyway.

OK Thanks. I've just thought of something else - I need to know how much space a clone will take up on the external drive. I know where to look on a windows PC, where do I look on a Mac to see the used space on the resident drive? This will then tell me what size to make the partions.

cheers.

Open a Finder window, and you should see your "resident" hard drive in the upper left-hand pane. Do an Option (Apple Key)- I and an Info window will show up. This will tell you how much space is used and how much is available.

You can use SuperDuper to create an image of the main drive.

Got it, many thanks.