How difficult will this be?

[G. Klopfenstein]

I currently have a 20GB hard drive that came with my computer and a 100GB hard drive (that is failing and will die anyday now). How difficult would it be to remove both of these drives and just replace them with the new 250GB drive I bought? The problem I'm having is unlike the 100GB drive which I just backed up on DVD, the 20GB drive will not let me copy it to another drive. The 20GB drive currently has all my preferences as well as my authorization codes for various plug ins and such.


So I guess the main question is, how do I make an exact copy of the existing 20GB drive (preferably to DVD), remove the drive, and then partition the 250GB to be both my MAC HD and my Pro Tools Drive?

[Slim Shady]

So I guess the main question is, how do I make an exact copy of the existing 20GB drive

Carbon Copy Cloner can make an exact clone of your system drive, retaining most all of your applications/preferences etc., and will also keep the majority of your authorizations intact (except for those that are based on drive IDs). You would first install the 250gb in place of the 100GB (so that both the 20gb and the 250gb are mountd) and do the clone, then you could remove the 20gb alltogether if that's your plan. If you have a firewire enclosure you could pop the 250gb into temporarily, it'll be a little easier than going inside the computer several times, but either way will work.

and then partition the 250GB to be both my MAC HD and my Pro Tools Drive?

You don't want to do that. Leave it as one partition, making seperate OS and Audio Drive partitions on a single drive is not recommended. You should really have 2 physical drives on your rig, one for the OS and one for your sessions as recommended by Digi, partitioning a single drive into two is actually worse for performance.

[G. Klopfenstein]

The problem I was having when I attempted to drag it to DVD or another hard drive is I would get an error messaging saying, 'could not be copied because you don't have certain permissions' will Carbon Copy Cloner eliminate this.

[Slim Shady]

Yes, that's what Carbon Copy Cloner does. It will ask you for your password before it clones the drive, this gives the app permission to copy all those restricted access files.

[G. Klopfenstein]

Why is only 128GB of my 250GB drive showing up?

[Slim Shady]

You must have an older machine that is pre-ATA6. Unfortunately any large internal drives will be limited to using only 128GB no matter how big they are, it's a limit of the ATA bus in your machine. Your options are to either pick up a PCI ATA-6 controller card, or get a firewire case to put the drive in, then you can use the full 250GB.

[G. Klopfenstein]

I had an external firewire drive previous to this and it wouldn't boot from the drive. if i get a firewire enclosure will I be able to boot from this drive via firewire? The external drive only worked USB 2.0 and it totally sucked

[G. Klopfenstein]

if I decided to bite the bullet and go to a G5 would I be able to put the 250GB directly in that? Do the G5s take another kind of RAM or can I also use the RAM from my G4?

[Slim Shady]

I had an external firewire drive previous to this and it wouldn't boot from the drive. if i get a firewire enclosure will I be able to boot from this drive via firewire? The external drive only worked USB 2.0 and it totally sucked

Macs can boot from Firewire drives, but not USB drives. While it certainly works very reliably, I don't know that I'd trust that setup enough to always boot up off a firewire drive. What you might want to consider, is cloning the 20gb over to the 250gb, then reformatting the 20GB and clone the 250gb back over to it (thus keeping the 20gb as your system OS drive). You could then use the 250GB as your PT Session drive, and even partition it if you still needed room for other documents or applications and you don't want them to spill into your PT file area. As long as you don't let PT try and access both partitions at the same time it's OK to partition your drive, but you might want to set one of them as 'read only' in the PT workspace to make sure it doesn't try and write files on both partitions at once.

If I decided to bite the bullet and go to a G5 would I be able to put the 250GB directly in that? Do the G5s take another kind of RAM or can I also use the RAM from my G4?

Unfortunately that's a big NO to both. G5's use SATA drives not IDE/ATA, although you could still use the 250gb in the firewire enclosure with the G5. The memory is totally different though, so you'd have to be prepared to purchase extra RAM if you go for a new machine.