Back Up, Restore on MacBook using SuperDuper!
Today, I finally got my Christmas present: 160gb internal drive for my MacBook and an external 250gb USB2/FireWire drive. The idea: I can do regular backups with a program called SuperDuper! and, in case something goes wrong, do a partial or complete restore.
I figured a good way to test this functionality was to backup the existing 60gb drive to the external drive, slap the new hard drive in, and do a restore. Since I backed up to an image file on the external drive–I did this so I could use the drive for other things too–the only way to restore was to boot off the Mac OSX Install DVDs and do the restore from there. The SuperDuper! manual explained exactly how to do this–go into the Disk Utility, click on Restore, mount the disk image file, drag some stuff around and off it goes! Nice in theory, but for some reason, the Disk Utility program does not allow me to drag anything on the screen!
A little Googling, and I discovered this was a fairly common problem that didn’t happen all the time. In my case, I ended up having to switch to a Terminal session and using the asr utility. Certainly not my favorite approach, but it eventually worked, and now my MacBook is living large–hard drive, that is.
Now off to load BootCamp. Yes, I have Parallels, but I want the option to boot completely into XP if I need to. Also, the latest beta of Parallels supports using a BootCamp partition, which is oh-so-much better than the alternative.
