Cloning disk after HD swap

I swapped the hard disk in my Macbook Pro to a larger 250 GB drive, and then used Disk Utility's restore feature to clone the contents of the old drive onto the new one. At first, all appeared OK- but I quickly discovered that it would kernel panic every other reboot, and fsck revealed tons of "extent allocation errors." fsck was unable to repair the disk, so at present, I'm trying agin using Carbon Copy Cloner.
For other folks who have done this, what have you found is a best practice for imaging data from one drive to another? Has Restore worked for you, or did you make a disk image and do it from there?
I know it could be done with Migration Assistant, but it doesn't always move apps correctly, so I thought a clone would be more efficient. Time machine is also a possibility, but it seems more direct to go straight from original drive > new drive, rather than original drive > backup > new drive. Comments?

Hi Chris,
What does Disk Utility say if you run it over your original HD?
If the original disk was corrupted then you shouldn't use any cloning or restore process unless or until you can repair it. Cloning or restoring from it will simply reproduce any existing problems or fail along the way.
My own approach in a situation like this would be to:
1) copy all critical data (docs, movies, music, whatever REALLY matters to you) manually to a third drive. If you can't do so, then try a data recovery program like ProSoft's "DataRescue 2".
2) Once I had the things that really mattered backed up to another source I would use either Disk Utility or , preferably, the LATEST version of Diskwarrior, to try to repair the original disk.
3) If the utility was able to repair the original drive then I would now attempt either a clone or restore to the new drive. If this is successful, well and good.
4) If the utility was not able to repair the original drive then I would do a completely clean installation of the OS on the new HD, after wiping it and reformatting it. I would then re-install any software straight from CD/DVD or fresh downloads. I would then copy across my "critical" material from the backup made in step 1.
Ultimately your success or failure is likely to be determined more by the integrity of your original drive than the particular software you use in attempting to get things back to where they were.
If the original drive isn't 100% OK even after repair, then copying ESSENTIAL individual files manually is going to be preferable to restoring, or using TimeMachine, or using CCC or SuperDuper.
If the original drive tests as sound, then any of the cloning / restoring / migrating approaches would probably work pretty much equally well. Failure in such a situation would actually suggest corruption of the destination disk that needs to be resolved before any copying attempt.
But whatever you do, back up the important stuff to a third location first of all. That way , assuming it proves possible, no matter what approach you use you will know that you won't lose the lot!
Cheers and good luck
Rod
Message was edited by: Rod Hagen

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