Want to swap internal 120GB hard drive with 500GB but retain Aperture Lib

Question

I am still on Aperture 2 but want to upgrade to Aperture 3. Current Aperture lib has grown to over 40GB. My laptop is starting to get generally slower and I feel that I have a lot of HDD fragmentation that I have not resolved yet. My internal HDD is 120GB with only 19GB now available. I do a monthly backup to an external 500GB drive using Time Machine. No other backups performed nor do I do any Aperture backup including vaulting. My laptop is roughly 3 years old.
I have not used any kind of defrag software. I have been reading about iDefrag which gets a lot of praise. But my understanding is that to use it, you need to have a lot of disk free space to copy files to temporarily. Below is what I plan to do and I am asking for opinions as to whether it is practical.
1.) Purchase another 500GB portable external drive.
2.) Divide new drive in 2 partitions; bootable 300GB and 165GB (remainder is used in formatting).
3.) Copy my entire internal 120GB hard drive to bootable 300GB partition as a full system backup.
4.) Start Aperture.
5.) Vault my entire Aperture 2 library to non-bootable 165GB partition.
6.) Stop Aperture.
7.) Have Apple technician swap out internal 120GB drive and replace it with a new 500GB drive.
(Data will not be copied from old drive to new drive by Apple tech.).
8.) Boot the reconfigured laptop from the 300GB external drive.
Q1.) Is it possible to boot from an external drive with no data on the internal drive?
9.) If yes, copy the 300GB drive to the new internal 500GB drive. (Maybe format 500GB first?)
Q2.) Will the copy put in place all previous software e.g. Aperture, etc. on new drive.
Q3.) Will I be able to start Aperture and retrieve images without accessing 165GB partition?
Q4.) If I can not access my Aperture library images after the copy, can I restore the library
from the vault operation in step 5?
10.) Upgrade to Aperture 3.

Answer 1

Hi metoymi;
Personally I don't like your plan. Even with two partition on a single drive all of your eggs are in a single basket. The most like disk problem is disk failure which will wipe out both partition on the single drive.
I know it is more to carry but I would suggest that you at least consider putting the old drive in a portable shell and using that for your vault instead. At least that way a disk failure is only wipe out half of your data.
Allan