Replacing hard drive, best way to transfer?

I bought a new Seagate 640gb, 5400rpm drive today and I was wondering what the best way is to get my data on there. I was going to backup my current drive, take it out, put in the Seagate and use Migration Assistant. Is this a common and safer way, or is there a preferred method? Thanks everyone.

The easiest way would be to put the Seagate in an enclosure, prepare and format it, and then use Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1885474&tstart=60
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
Once you have made the bootable clone on the Seagate, you can then boot from it and make sure all is well. Then you can install the Seagate and all your data will be there. It will be an identical copy of your old drive.
If all is not well, that could indicate a problem with the new drive, and you will find that out before you install it.
Good luck!

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I'm not familiar with Retrospect. Does it make a bootable clone? Can you attach your backup to your MacBook and use it as the startup disk? If so, make the backup onto the new drive and test it. Then put it into your MacBook using [These Instructions|http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/macbook13_mem_hdm>. (The video shows RAM and HD installation) If you're careful and follow the steps, you won't hurt your MacBook. If you don't feel confident with the procedure, get outside help.
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I'm not up on Boot Camp, so I don't know how to clone it. But I do know that you can use Super Duper to clone a Mac partition to a partition of another drive.
I wonder if you could format and partition the new drive in the enclosure. Then use Super Duper to clone the Mac partition of your old drive to the larger partition on the new drive. If there is a utility that will clone Boot camp, then you could clone it to the second partition. If there's not a cloning utility for boot camp, I would assume there is still some way to get everything moved over to the new partition.
I have partitioned my boot drive just to see what would happen. It seems like the data stays on one partition and the other partition is empty. This is with 186 GB available on a 250 GB drive. No idea where any of it is on the platter.
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What I don't know is anything about Bootcamp and how best to move it over.
Don't know if this helps much--but I hope it does.
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I put it in one of these silicon cases:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/HDANTISH25/
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http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEQM0GBK/
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I have a brand new harddrive that I want to put in my PB. I put the harddrive in a FW enclosure and installed OSX 10.4 from an install DVD. Looking on this forum for an idea as to how to transfer my system over to the new drive BEFORE putting it in my PB I discovered the existence of SuperDuper.
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1) I downloaded SuperDuper for free.
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Best way to replace Hard Drive?

Hi,
I am ready to replace my hard drive and get a Solid State Drive.
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xsi wrote:
Hi,
I am ready to replace my hard drive and get a Solid State Drive.
What is the best way to transfer the contents from the old hard drive to the new?
Except from Time Machine (I guess you can do this with time machine... not sure), does Leopard offers any other utility?
Thanks
There are at least two free utilities for cloning your HD.
CCC and SuperDuper!
Make a bootable clone of your HD and test it.
Then swap your HDs and reclone the new HD from the clone.
It's that simple, and relatively fast and, unlike TM, you can test the clone beforehand.
CCC
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
SuperDuper!
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

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Replacing hard drive, best way to transfer?

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