Clone Hard Drive and boot to different Mac

First off, lemme give the details... I just got a lacie rugged 500gb hard drive, and i have a macbook pro and an imac (both intel). Now my imac is in a bit of a shambles because i never really went through the process of deleting all the preference files and packages for software i used, i just simply deleted the program itself... so my library (and other things like my itunes library) are somewhat out of order. However, my macbook pro started from scratch, and has everything, including itunes, in order. Now that i have my new external HD, i want to move any important files from the imac (my family guy collection :P), then make a bootable clone of my macbook pro's hard drive (using intego personal backup x5 i believe), erase the imac's hard drive, and restore from the backup of my laptop's hard drive. Basically, i want to make my imac a clone of my macbook pro, while physically deleting all the unimportant stuff off of it, rather than just booting from the external hd every single time. Any suggestions as to wiping the imac's hard drive and restoring from the X5 backup? P.S. When you erase the hard drive (i am assuming using disk utility??) it leaves the OS intact no? So that when you boot you should be able to press option or whatever to boot from the drive? I have already explained what im goin for, step by step would be greatly appreciated....

My bad, didnt realize this was a macbook (black and white) specific group, ill re-post

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Mike, welcome to the forum,
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Please see the following article in the forum Knowledgebase; Cloning Hard Drive Including The Predesktop Area With Acronis
Andy ______________________________________
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Getting a new Mac: need to transfer files/applications, have external hard drive, and wipe clean old Mac to give to family member

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Crawdaddy wrote:
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VirtualBox is free.
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Hi,
I'm not sure if this is in the right place, so apologies in advance if not. I've looked around the internet for a good while now, and I haven't found anyone in my exact position.
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Here is a quick suggestion for you:
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Search Google for creating a bootable USB installer for Windows 7. I found a link that gave good instructions on how to do this using DiskPart.
Follow the instructions to make the bootable USB stick for installing Windows 7 using your virtual machine you created above.
Use the USB stick to install Windows on your new PC.
Remove the virtual Windows machine from your Mac.
Remove Virtual Box from your Mac.
I found a set of instructions and built an installable USB stick last night that worked great for installing Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) onto my older ThinkPad I had sitting at home. The USB installer also installs in about half the time as a DVD install. The only reason I have you create the virtual Windows PC is that all of the instructions for makeing the Windows install USB stick are written assuming that you already have access to a running Windows PC. By doing this install, you have up to 3 days before you would need to activate it and you can build the installer USB stick and remove teh virtual computer long before that.

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Okay so today I've erased one of my external hard drives, and reformatted it as "Mac OS Journaled". If I copy a huge folder on it from my MacBook to the external HD, there's nothing wrong and it goes fine.
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Hey, can i clone my Macbook Pro internal hard drive and then paste it all onto a formated external hard drive, then make the Mac use the external as the primary hard drive?

hey, can i clone my Macbook Pro internal hard drive and then paste it all onto a formated external hard drive, then make the Mac use the external as the primary hard drive? please help for i only have around 618mb left out of 189GB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If what doesn't work?
If cloning your internal drive to the external drive is not successful, I expect CCC will tell you so. Assuming that doesn't happen, you will have a bootable replica of the internal drive on the external drive once CCC has finished.
You can then do any of several things:
1. Replace your internal drive with a much larger one (320GB or 500GB, or even larger), and clone the external drive's contents onto the new drive so you'll have all your data in one place. Note that if you do this, you'll also need to buy an external drive that's large enough to back the new internal drive up on.
2. Boot from the external drive as a temporary measure while you clear at least 30-40GB of data off the internal drive, allowing you to keep using it and saving small amounts of data to it. The external drive will then contain the only copies of the files you've deleted from the internal drive, so you'll need a seond external drive large enough to back both the other drives up on.
If you can't comfortably clear a minimum of 30GB off the internal drive, you really need a larger internal drive right now, and you shouldn't bother fooling around with the inadequate one you have — you'll just quickly overfill it again.
3. Replace the optical drive in your MBP with a large conventional hard drive, giving you two hard drives inside the machine. You will then need one or more external drives large enough to back up both of the internal drives.
If you sense a theme here — back up, back up, back up — you are correct. It's flat-out foolhardy to own or use a computer without maintaining complete, up-to-date backups of everything at all times.

Clone Hard Drive and boot to different Mac

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