FireWire Target disk mode to update laptop

[MamaMoose]

Occasionally, I need to make a copy of my latest boot drive onto my laptop boot drive before I travel. I had been using Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the Mac Pro's drive to the MacBook Pro. This gave me a bootable version of the OS on the laptop. I think I have been doing this the hard way! I can connect a FW 800 cable between the Mac Pro and the lap top. If I go into FW target disk mode, the volumes on the laptop appear on the Mac Pro's desktop. Now to update the volumes on the laptop, can I just drag and drop a copy of a Mac Pro volume (including Boot) onto its sister volume? Is the update done? Or do I erase the copied volume first on the Mac Pro and then drag and drop?

Can someone unconfuse me about this? No suggestions allowed of a two-by-four applied to cranium  , please.

Thanks,

MamaMoose

[gunug]

Mamamoose, while it is late and I'm not going to experiment at this hour I'm sure that you can back up an image, made with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, onto a Firewire connected drive (400 or 800 Firewire would make no difference).  I suspect that you could also use Diskcopy to do this as well; although you might have to use a terminal command line to augment Diskcopy so as to enable some features.  I sure that you can do this because I've done it recently at work!  You might need to check out how the volume format is set up on the drive you're hooking up (this was a gotcha for me a couple of times):


Thanks to Ken Stone for putting up this image in his webpage: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html

[krissel]

Tom, drag and drop is not the way to update OSX.

If you are doing this often, I would recommend getting the paid version of SuperDuper. With it all you have to do is tell it to update the MBP system from the main one either with Copy Newer or Copy Different.  Since it is only adding or changing some files and not the whole thing, it will only take minutes.

Not sure if you are using one of the CCC versions that requires you to erase and install but apparently they now let you try out the entire feature filled app for free. That might be sufficient.

[jchuzi]

Drag-and-drop does not copy the invisible files that are essential to running the system. If you want a fully functional, bootable copy, you must use a cloning procedure. In my view, the registration fee for SuperDuper is well worth the price. If I do a full disk clone, it takes about 45 minutes. Running SD's Smart Update takes about 8 minutes. This updates only those files that were changed since the last update.

I haven't used Carbon Copy Cloner in a long time but I believe that it now allows you to make an incremental update. Someone else will have to confirm this.

[MamaMoose]

One problem that I have with Carbon Copy Cloner is that the clonee shares files with the original cloned. So, for example , if I boot into the clonee in order to run Disk Warrior on on the original cloned OS, Disk Warrior fails as it "sees file on the clonee that it thinks are active in the cloned.

My question is will Super Duper have the same problem? Even if does not, I still have to clone to an external drive, then clone the external drive to the internal drive of the MacBook Pro. Isn't there an easier way?

MamaMoose

[krissel]

You could try changing the name of one of the clones so the file path would be different. That might solve the Disk Warrior problem. Then change the name back when done.

Also, you may have run into the Spotlight app indexing the clone. In that case go to System Prefs/Spotlight and drop the drive icon that you are fixing with DW into the window to stop indexing. That alone could be the reason DW is claiming the files are in use.

Don't know of an easier way to transfer a bootable system than cloning.  I got Leopard onto my G4 by cloning my MBP to an external and then to the G4. After some tweaking it worked beautifully and still does.

[MamaMoose]

It just dawned on me how I can use Disk Warrior without running into the problem I stated above. I will put a bare system as a volume  into one of my drives. Then I will add Disk Warrior. (I will delete it from all my other volumes). Now, when I want to repair a disk, I will boot into the Disk Warrior 'volume", and run it from there. Since none of the other volumes are bootable, I will not have a problem. Also, when I backup using CCC, there will be no Disk Warrior on any the volumes involved.

P. S. Kris thanks for your thought about Spotlight. I will try your suggestion. TNC



MamaMoose

[gunug]

Thanks Mamamoose; I have Diskwarrior (version from 2 years or so back) but it works okay on OS 10.4 so maybe 10.5 as well.  I hadn't thought of using it in this situation but I don't think I've ever done anything but basic repair with it!  Maybe I'll check on updating!

[jchuzi]

You should definitely upgrade your version of Disk Warrior. The current version works in 10.3 - 10.6 according to Alsoft so you'll be all set for every one of those OSs. It is dangerous to use a utility on an OS version that the utility was never designed for. Not so incidentally, the current version of DW is faster and has more features than your old version. Go for it!

[Xairbusdriver]

I haven't used DW but a few times...didn't even have it until this year...but I thought I simply booted from the DVD to do the repair work I wanted. Perhaps it does more when actually installed on a Volume? I assume it would still not be wise to 'repair' a drive, even with DW installed on it, when that is the current boot drive/volume (if DW even allowed that).

[jchuzi]

I am a longtime user of DW so I can answer your questions. The same options are available whether you boot from the DW CD or from another volume that has DW installed. As with Disk Utility and similar apps that rebuild the directory, you cannot do this on the boot volume. I have a clone of my main drive and I boot from that when I want to run DW. It's a lot faster than booting from the CD.