Testing PT 7 - Best Approach

[Howardk]

I hope to embark on the installation and testing of PT in the next few days on my Dual 1Ghz G4 w/HD4 (part Accel). I need to keep my existing System Disk in its present working state and, as it is a lot of work to install everything from scatch on a new hard drive, I am thinking it would be best to:
- clone the existing drive to a new drive
- do a clean install of OSX 10.4.x to the cloned drive
- then install and test ProTools there, doing other plugin updates etc. . . as req'd.

Any comments, warnings, ideas, other approaches ?
I must admit I have never cloned a Mac drive. What is the best way to do that ?

[iamstudios]

With Retrospect you can duplicate your disk to another disk. Afterwards you can use that second disk as a startup drive. We do this all the time, just to have a backup available if the (first) drive suddenly stops working. check out http://www.dantz.com

[brendan]

clone a drive?

easy-peasy.

You can use any number of utilities, including Apple's Disk Utility and a number of back up apps, but I still use the ever popular Carbon Copy Cloner, available for free here:

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

The process is reasonably intuitive... just install CCC and check its preferences (I always enable "repair disk permissions", among a few other things). Make sure both the source drive and target drive are mounted. Then, select the appropriate source and target drives from CCC's 2 drop down menus, and click the clone button. A 2GB drive should clone in about 30 minutes.

When that's done, select your new cloned drive from startup disk in system prefs and reboot. voila!

[Andre Knecht]

Carbon Copy Cloner

[Loudnoize Ent.]

With Carbon Copy, can we copy to a external Firewire drive or does the drive have to be internal. Just curious. Thanks...

[crizdee]

Hi,

External is fine.

create a partition that is just a bit bigger than your system drive! make sure that partition is cleared/erased first and repair permission before cloning.

Chris