InfiniteMac OSx86 - View Single Post - Disk Utility

naquaada · 04-26-2008, 03:52 AM

Create Backups with Disk Utility

I always have two bootable partitions on my harddisk (three total), a big main partition and a small (15GB) partition for recovery reasons. If the main partition crashes - that could already happen only by installing one false kext - it is possible to reboot in the other system and fix the problem from there. I used this method since Tiger 10.4.5 and it saved me a lot of re-installations. And it saves a lot of new installations! You create once that installation as good as possible. Then you create a compressed .dmg of it and save it on another partition or external harddrive. How saves this an installation? Easy: Select the partition the image should get a new installation. Select 'Restore' in the main window of Disk Utility. Since Leopard the image must be checked once before restoring: Use 'Scan Image for Restore' from the image menu and select the image you just created. After it suceeded successfully, select it with the 'Image' button in the restore window or drag it on the 'Source' field. Drag the volume on which it should be installed on the 'Destination' field and select 'Erase destination'. After the password it rewrites the image to the new partition. It is no problem to restore a smaller image to a larger drive. That's why my Recovery partition is so small. Although, it's still oversized. I have a lot of Tools on it, but I removed unneccessary kexts and the PPC part of the most programs, so only 7 GB are used. That's only nearly the size of a standard installation. As a bzip2-compressed image it uses only 2,7 GB. So it's possible to keep it on a portable FAT32 harddrive or on a DVD.

Tips: before compression defragment the harddisk. Thats normally not neccessary, but it moves the files to the beginning to the drive. This is better for the compressing process. You can also optmize the compression if you overwrite the unnused blocks with zeroes before. The creating and rewriting of .dmg backups is also possible with the Installation DVD, select the Disk Utility from the Utilites menu and do the process as described above.

In all Tiger images since 10.4.8 you get an Error -5308 if you do this and your destination partition is destroyed. If you don't select 'erase harddisk' you'll get an Error 19, 'drive not supported'. But I also got much worse error messages with an 8-digit error number and so on.