Having trouble with SuperDuper. Please help!

I'm just an average user, not particularly techie, but I'm trying to be as careful as I can about backing up my data. I've read lots of warnings that everyone should have at least 3 backups in at least 2 different media. So I have everything from my iMac backed up to two separate external hard drives (Seagate) plus the cloud (Sugarsync). I've only just discovered the notion of creating bootable clones of your HD, so I'm trying to do this now with SuperDuper.

I've just bought a new rMBP, but before I stop using my old machine (iMac 5,1 running OS X 10.6.8) or transfer anything from old machine to new, I want to make a bootable clone of the ageing iMac HD. Using SuperDuper I created a clone to an external hard drive (LaCie rugged triple USB 3.0). I'm using USB because I don't have a Firewire cable, and I suspect my iMac is only capable of USB 2.0. I had the LaCie drive already partitioned because I already had some data backed up on part A. I used SuperDuper to reformat part B to the required Mac OS extended (journaled). The SuperDuper copying process seemed to go fine. I checked the log – no error messages.

So does anyone know why the clone doesn't seem to be bootable? It doesn't even show up as an option in Startup Disk.

Is USB part of the problem? Do I need to buy a Firewire cable for starters?

I sent a message to SuperDuper support, but got no reply yet.

Any help would be appreciated ... I'm on a steep learning curve here!

I used SuperDuper to reformat part B to the required Mac OS extended (journaled). The SuperDuper copying process seemed to go fine. I checked the log – no error messages.

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That's your problem. The drive is not going to boot from the second partition. You need to erase and reformat the drive correctly: One partition, HFS+, GUID partition scheme. Doesn't matter if it's USB or firewire.

chscag said:

That's your problem. The drive is not going to boot from the second partition. You need to erase and reformat the drive correctly: One partition, HFS+, GUID partition scheme. Doesn't matter if it's USB or firewire.

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Ah, OK, at least it's something reasonably simple. I'll reformat the drive as suggested and have another go. Thanks.