Upgrading To Leopard - Part II: Clone And Go
December 13, 2007 - 11:43am — Todd Howard
Let's continue on with this brief discussion of the things to mull over before making the jump to Leopard.
So, you’re one of those folks who has decided that you need to “back up your computer” before upgrading, eh? There really is only one surefire catch all way to do it— which also happens to be the fastest and easiest way to do it—and that is to “clone your drive.” There are several software applications available that will accomplish this, one notable free product is called “Carbon Copy Cloner” and works wonderfully. It’s written by a guy named Mike Bombich, and can be found at bombich.com. Another is SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket, but they've been really slow in getting their Leopard compatible version out, and they have a fee. I use CCC.
You’ll need an external hard drive to use Carbon Copy Cloner, and when you run it, you'll tell the software which hard drive you want to clone, and which hard drive you want to clone it to, and then you click go. It's that simple. It takes a couple of hours to run (depending on the amount of data on your drive), but when you’re done, your entire hard drive—every single bit on it—has been duplicated onto this other hard drive. In fact, you can even boot up from this external drive later on, and it will look and feel exactly as though you were looking at your old computer. Once you are booted from your new Leopard installation, you will be able to connect to this drive and copy all of your music, movies, pictures, mail, calendars, address books, and so on, right back over to your new system. In some cases, you'll be able to “import the data” into the new version/installation of the respective application in Leopard, and that way nothing gets left behind. You can keep this clone of your old system as long as you like, so that even months down the road if you realize you need some obscure file that you know is only on that old clone, you can still connect that drive and go get it.
External FireWire and USB hard drives are so inexpensive these days, you really can’t afford NOT to purchase one to make a clone of your system. In fact, no matter what type of install you do, clean install or straight upgrade, there is no reason whatsoever to neglect getting an external drive—you can order one online and have it overnight in most cases—and cloning your boot drive before you install Leopard. Don’t wait until you have catastrophic data loss before you get on the ball on this one. I can't emphasize this enough.
Once your drive is cloned and therefore backed up, you can insert your Leopard DVD, double click on it, and double click on the installer icon. The Leopard installer will ask you to restart your computer. Clicking Restart will automatically force the computer to restart and boot up FROM the Leopard DVD, giving you all the access you need to your boot drive to repair it, erase it, and install Mac OS 10.5 onto it.
The first thing you will want to do is to repair your disk, and it’s easy to do, but you’ll have to wait until the computer reboots, and choose your starting language from the first menu that comes up.
Then, you’ll want to Choose “Disk Utility” from the Utilities menu in the top menu bar, and doing so will open the Disk Utility application on top of the Leopard installer. Look for your hard drive on the left, click once on it, and then click the First Aid tab at the top of the right section. On the lower right of the First Aid panel, click “Repair Disk” and wait a few minutes. Chances are, you’ll get green text that says “Repair Disk Has Finished, the Disk seems to be OK.” And that’s good. If it says it found some problems and it fixed them, that’s also good, in fact that’s better than good—these "repairs" were most likely some pesky drive issues that may have made life difficult in Leopard-land later on, so be glad you caught them now. If it says the disk has problems and cannot be repaired, well then I must recommend you do not try and install Leopard on this drive. Call Apple Care if you purchased it for this computer (if you didn't buy Apple Care and your computer is less than a year old, you can buy it on the Apple Store, and then call the number). You can also opt to bring your computer to the nearest Apple Store or computer repair shop and pay them to diagnose and fix your hard drive. If you’ve already cloned your drive successfully, then another option is replacing the drive in your computer. Chances are that you can get something with twice or more the storage than you had to begin with, for a nominal cost. While you’re at it, if you are planning on using Time Machine in Leopard for backing up your system day to day, then you will need another external hard drive for that purpose as well, just remember, your Time Machine drive has to be the same size or bigger (bigger is better) than your boot drive.
Stay tuned for Part III of, upgrading to Leopard, where we'll cover the actual installation and the retrieval of your data from your clone.
Plug: Here is some more info about the Leopard Jumpstart DMTS Training DVD, if you're interested.
Let's continue on with this brief discussion of the things to mull over before making the jump to Leopard.
So, you’re one of those folks who has decided that you need to “back up your computer” before upgrading, eh? There really is only one surefire catch all way to do it— which also happens to be the fastest and easiest way to do it—and that is to “clone your drive.” There are several software applications available that will accomplish this, one notable free product is called “Carbon Copy Cloner” and works wonderfully. It’s written by a guy named Mike Bombich, and can be found at bombich.com. Another is SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket, but they've been really slow in getting their Leopard compatible version out, and they have a fee. I use CCC.
You’ll need an external hard drive to use Carbon Copy Cloner, and when you run it, you'll tell the software which hard drive you want to clone, and which hard drive you want to clone it to, and then you click go. It's that simple. It takes a couple of hours to run (depending on the amount of data on your drive), but when you’re done, your entire hard drive—every single bit on it—has been duplicated onto this other hard drive. In fact, you can even boot up from this external drive later on, and it will look and feel exactly as though you were looking at your old computer. Once you are booted from your new Leopard installation, you will be able to connect to this drive and copy all of your music, movies, pictures, mail, calendars, address books, and so on, right back over to your new system. In some cases, you'll be able to “import the data” into the new version/installation of the respective application in Leopard, and that way nothing gets left behind. You can keep this clone of your old system as long as you like, so that even months down the road if you realize you need some obscure file that you know is only on that old clone, you can still connect that drive and go get it.
External FireWire and USB hard drives are so inexpensive these days, you really can’t afford NOT to purchase one to make a clone of your system. In fact, no matter what type of install you do, clean install or straight upgrade, there is no reason whatsoever to neglect getting an external drive—you can order one online and have it overnight in most cases—and cloning your boot drive before you install Leopard. Don’t wait until you have catastrophic data loss before you get on the ball on this one. I can't emphasize this enough.
Once your drive is cloned and therefore backed up, you can insert your Leopard DVD, double click on it, and double click on the installer icon. The Leopard installer will ask you to restart your computer. Clicking Restart will automatically force the computer to restart and boot up FROM the Leopard DVD, giving you all the access you need to your boot drive to repair it, erase it, and install Mac OS 10.5 onto it.
The first thing you will want to do is to repair your disk, and it’s easy to do, but you’ll have to wait until the computer reboots, and choose your starting language from the first menu that comes up.
Then, you’ll want to Choose “Disk Utility” from the Utilities menu in the top menu bar, and doing so will open the Disk Utility application on top of the Leopard installer. Look for your hard drive on the left, click once on it, and then click the First Aid tab at the top of the right section. On the lower right of the First Aid panel, click “Repair Disk” and wait a few minutes. Chances are, you’ll get green text that says “Repair Disk Has Finished, the Disk seems to be OK.” And that’s good. If it says it found some problems and it fixed them, that’s also good, in fact that’s better than good—these "repairs" were most likely some pesky drive issues that may have made life difficult in Leopard-land later on, so be glad you caught them now. If it says the disk has problems and cannot be repaired, well then I must recommend you do not try and install Leopard on this drive. Call Apple Care if you purchased it for this computer (if you didn't buy Apple Care and your computer is less than a year old, you can buy it on the Apple Store, and then call the number). You can also opt to bring your computer to the nearest Apple Store or computer repair shop and pay them to diagnose and fix your hard drive. If you’ve already cloned your drive successfully, then another option is replacing the drive in your computer. Chances are that you can get something with twice or more the storage than you had to begin with, for a nominal cost. While you’re at it, if you are planning on using Time Machine in Leopard for backing up your system day to day, then you will need another external hard drive for that purpose as well, just remember, your Time Machine drive has to be the same size or bigger (bigger is better) than your boot drive.
Stay tuned for Part III of, upgrading to Leopard, where we'll cover the actual installation and the retrieval of your data from your clone.
Plug: Here is some more info about the Leopard Jumpstart DMTS Training DVD, if you're interested.
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