[Mike_Atamian1]

Hi all,



I am getting indicators from S.M.A.R.T. that my internal hard drive on my MacPro is dying- the one with OS X and a Windows BootCamp partition. My backup internal drive is fine.

I have a new drive on order. My question is though, will I be able to use Time Machine to mirror my current drive on the new drive? Or will I have to install OS X again on the new drive, and then restore via Time Machine?

Second question: what about my Windows partition? Will I be able to copy over everything from the current partition to a new partition on the new hard drive?



Thanks in advance,

Mike

[mdawson]

You can use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to clone your original system drive. Those utilities only work on Mac volumes though. I do not have Leopard, so I do not know what recovery from a previous save will do for your NTFS volume. As you have a Mac Pro with four drive bays and hard drives are inexpensive, setting up a RAID 1 array may be in your best interest in the long run.

[smax013]

mdawson said:

You can use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to clone your original system drive. Those utilities only work on Mac volumes though.

As noted, Time Machine itself will not "clone a drive". For that you would need something like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. And as noted those will only work for the Mac partition...to my knowledge.

Now, supposedly, you can use your Time Machine drive with the Leopard install disk to restore from a backup...or at least that is what an Apple Store employee told my dad at one point. I have never tried it myself.

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I do not have Leopard, so I do not know what recovery from a previous save will do for your NTFS volume.

The Bootcamp partition is the tough one. Supposely, you can just copy stuff back over to a Bootcamp partition after running the Bootcamp Assistant to setup the partition...at least according to some Internet searches I have done on the subject, but I have never tried it. If I get around to it, I will test that theory as I upgraded my hard drive on my MacBook Pro when I upgraded to Leopard...but I have not yet dealt with my Bootcamp partition (it had actually gotten a little hosed on my Tiger internal drive).

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As you have a Mac Pro with four drive bays and hard drives are inexpensive, setting up a RAID 1 array may be in your best interest in the long run.

I agree...but still backup even if you do go to a RAID 1 array.

[mdawson]

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smax013 wrote:

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...still backup even if you do go to a RAID 1 array.

Agreed. No internal backup scheme should be left as the only backup as such a backup is vulnerable to a system catastrophe. RAID 1 will provide mirroring of the primary drives onto a second set of internal drives on the fly (Tier 0 backup). External drives should be used for further backup of the system as they are less likely to be affected by a system mishap (Tier 1). Ideally, the external backup drives would only be attached when a backup is in progress, but would otherwise be detached from the computer when not in use (Tier 2). Tier 3 backup would require keeping the backups off-site when they are not in use or engaging a remote backup server.

Given that Tier 3 backup schemes are either too inconvenient?remembering to take backups on- and off-site as needed?too limited or too expensive for home users, Tier 1 or Tier 2 are recommended to compliment a Tier 0 internal RAID 1 mirroring backup scheme. Unless his financial situation permits otherwise, Mike can even build his backup scheme piecemeal.

He has not indicated what capacities his hard drives are, but let us go with the following scenario:
bq. Phase 1 Replace failing primary drive with a 1 TB SATA drive ($105.99). Replace secondary drive with 1.5 TB SATA drive ($147.99); 50% capacity increase recommended for Time Machine. * A second set of drives, 1 TB and 1.5 TB, for setting up a RAID 1 (mirror) array internally ($253.98).
bq. Phase 2 An external 1 TB FireWire 800 drive for Tier 1/2 backup of the primary drive ($184.99). An external 1.5 TB FireWire 800 drive for Tier 1/2 backup of the secondary internal drive ($229.99).
Phase 1 would come to $507.96 shipping and Phase 2 comes in at $414.98 shipping. The linked VAR, OWC, has reasonable shipping rates.

Hey smax013, what Tier would Time Machine be? :) I know you can come up with a thoroughly entertaining answer.

[Mike_Atamian1]

Thanks for the useful information guys. But my original question is unanswered.

There are three hard drives in question: the current, failing one which has MAC OS 10.5.7 and a Windows partiition, a backup internal, which has the latest Time Machine backups, and a new 1TB internal on order. What I need to know is whether I can restore my currently archived Time Machine backup on the new hard drive, which should be here tomorrow. If so, do I have to install Mac OS X first, or will the Time Machine backup automatically restore the system to the new hard drive? Is it even possible to restore a Time Machine backup from one hard drive onto another (on the same machine)? I would really prefer that if it is possible.



The second question is how to copy my Windows partition to a new partition on the new hard drive. My IT guy said for Windows, it is easy to ghost by copying from hard drive to hard drive via software he has. I do not know if that will work on the Mac (requires you boot off the CD which has minimal Windows plus the ghosting software).



Thanks,

Mike

[smax013]

As I said, you can restore from Time Machine using your install disk:

http://docs.info.app...5/en/15638.html

http://blog.duncanda...me-machine.html

[mdawson]

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MIke_Atamian1 wrote:

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The second question is how to copy my Windows partition to a new partition on the new hard drive. My IT guy said for Windows, it is easy to ghost by copying from hard drive to hard drive via software he has. I do not know if that will work on the Mac (requires you boot off the CD which has minimal Windows plus the ghosting software).

Unless someone on these boards has successfully cloned an NTFS volume using as Mac, you may be hard pressed to get a solid answer to this. Mac cloning software cannot write to an NTFS volume, as OS X can only read from NTFS volumes. By the same token, any software that runs under Windows cannot be run in OS X and I am not sure if either virtualization or Boot Camp will permit booting into Windows from a CD. Mac cloning software does not require booting from a separate volume to perform what is effectively a data copy procedure that only differs in its methodology.

Unfortunately, because Windows cloning applications requiring booting from the CD, you may have no choice but to create a new NTFS volume and then copy all of your files over. You have more than enough drive bays to accomplish this task before you replace your original primary drive.

[Mike_Atamian1]

Yes you did. Thanks very much!

[Mike_Atamian1]

After restoring via Time Machine, I am going to see if the CD my IT guy will work. I doubt it, but it is worth a shot. This probably will require me to first create a BootCamp partition on the new drive. I'm guessing there is a 5% chance the Mac can boot off the CD in Windows that my IT guy gives m- if so a ghosting would work. If not, it is manual copy time.



Question: say I create a new partition on the new disk and install Windows on it. Can I directly copy data from the old partition on the old drive to the new one on the new drive in MAc OS X? If I understand you correctly, "no", because MAC OS X can only read but not write to NTFSformatted volumes.

[mdawson]

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Mike_Atamian1 wrote:

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Can I directly copy data from the old partition on the old drive to the new one on the new drive in MAc OS X? If I understand you correctly, "no", because MAC OS X can only read but not write to NTFSformatted volumes.

Your assessment would be correct. Given that you have a Windows partition, I would assume that you are either running Windows through virtualization or Boot Camp. In which case it does not matter that OS X cannot write to an NTFS volume. If that is not the case, then I would have to ask why you are wasting storage capacity on an NTFS partition.

[Mike_Atamian1]

I'm running via BootCamp. So I would have to boot in Windows on partition 1. Hopefully I will be able to see the other partition on the other drive, to copy over.

[mdawson]

Boot Camp will see any NTFS or FAT volume attached to your Mac. The HFS+ volumes will not be recognized.

[smax013]

Mike_Atamian1 said:

Question: say I create a new partition on the new disk and install Windows on it. Can I directly copy data from the old partition on the old drive to the new one on the new drive in MAc OS X? If I understand you correctly, "no", because MAC OS X can only read but not write to NTFSformatted volumes.

Correct...the Mac OS by default CANNOT write to an NTFS formatted volume. There are supposedly ways to add that ability, but I have never do them and don't know how well they work...which was why I used FAT32 for my Bootcamp partition (which you can do as long as it is less than something like 30 GB or so).

If you do have it as FAT32, then according to some pages that I found with a Google search a while ago, you should be able to just copy the old Bootcamp partition files to the new Bootcamp parition...in theory. I have not gotten around to trying it, so I do not know if it really worked. Some of those site also suggested that using a Windows clone/ghosting program would work, but again I have not gotten around to try that (I have TrueImage that I use for cloning on my Windows machines).

[Mike_Atamian1]

Thanks to everyone for the useful comments. To run this to closure, here is what I did that worked flawlessly:

Inserted new SATA drive, formatted.

Used BootCamp Assistant to partition new disk (I used a 64GB partiton for Windows). Closed Assistant.

Used Time Machine and reinstalled my backup on Mac partition on new drive

Re-ran Boot Camp Assistant, Installed Windows on new drive partition, Bootcamp extensions off Leopard CD, then updated Windows over Interne. I formatted as NTFS (Quick) [Not sure what the differences were for NTFS (Quick) and NTFS, just followed example in Apple documentation for BootCamp].

Re-inserted old "failing" drive, manually copied over files to new Windows partition. After all this was done, the S.M.A.R.T. indicators telling me the old drive was near failing reverted back to OK status. Hmmmph!

Everything works flawlessly EXCEPT one thing. I use a freeware application called BootChamp to boot into Windows. It remembers the old Windows partition, not the new one. I can't find a way to change this. I suppose once I erase the old Windows partition this will go away.

One thing that oies seem odd to me: a person could use Time Machine as I did, and then pull the drive out and put it in another identical spec computer. Wonder if Apple covered this (either via software or via the EULA).Seems like a cheap way to illegally get a copy of Leopard.



Mike