Backing up a System Drive

[Punx]

Back in the dark ages when I purchased my MAC they only came with a 20GB system drive. I almost instantly got another 100GB internal drive to do all my audio recording. On my particular machine 100GB is the largest hard drive it will recognize. However in the 6 years i've had the computer the system drive is now down to only 6.5GB of memory left. How would I go about doing a direct copy of my current hard drive and replace it with another 100GB hard drive without losing any settings, authorizations,etc.? Is there an easy way to do this? 2 100GB hard drives would be much more effective then a 100GB and a 20GB. Thanks in advance for the help. I'm not computer illiterate by any means but i'm not super technical with stuff like this. So simple is better!

[Slim Shady]

1) temporarily remove your current 100gb drive and install your new 100gb soon-to-be system drive.

2) download Carbon Copy Cloner and use it to clone your system drive over to the new 100gb drive (after formatting properly of course)

3) remove the old 20gb system drive, re-install your old 100gb audio drive and you should be good to go, using the new 100gb cloned system drive as your startup disk.

[Punx]

So doing a Carbon Copy doesn't require you to copy it to the same drive? That was my concern. That the copy could only be put on the same drive in which case I wouldn't have enough room on the drive I'm copying.

[Slim Shady]

So doing a Carbon Copy doesn't require you to copy it to the same drive?

Um no, that would make the software utterly pointless. Check out the product description of CCC...

Carbon Copy Cloner

In its simplest form, CCC will clone one hard drive to another, copying every single block or file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive.

[M.Brane]

Also check out Super Duper.