back up one hard drive to another

[bajagirl1]

Having not been a mac user for long I now have a 1.5 WD external hard drive working on my Mac os 10.5.8 I took a smaller hard drive (external) off but am unsure how to dump the info from the hard drive I replaced to the new one?
Thanks, Donna

 

[Daniel_Upton]

Hey bajagirl1,
Let me get a grip of what your asking..

Are you saying that you had a harddrive in your mac which you have now replaced with a larger one..

And you would like to grab all the information from that drive for use with the new drive?

There are a couple of ways to do this..

Your easiest option would have been while the drive was in the mac as the primary drive to use a 10.5 feature called "time machine" to create a backup of your files (everything apart from the operating system) to an external drive and then to use this backup to restore your computer to its original state after reinstallation..

However i am guessing this is now not an option as you have made a transition.. your other option would be to manually reinstall your applications and copy and paste your files over,

Some people also talk about using an application to clone your drive, but depending on how important your stuff is

Hope that was some vague help..
Gimmie a shout back!

Daniel,

BTW what kinda mac do you have?

 

[bajagirl1]

Daniel, I have an OS X about two years old desktop. No sure how you mean create backup of old portable hard drive. Don't suppose it it possible to just hook up the old
hard drive until I see it on the desktop than grab it and slide it to the new hard
drive? You know like grabbing pictures and throwing them into Iphoto?
Tks, Donna

 

[chscag]

Donna:

Your best bet is to use software which can clone the contents of your current hard drive to the new one and at the same time render the new drive bootable. That way, all you would have to do is swap the drives and you'll be up and running in no time. I recommend downloading and using "Carbon
Copy Cloner". It's donation ware which means it's free but the author requests you to send him a donation if you use and like his software.

Here's the download LINK.

Regards.