How to replace the hard drive without reinstalling osx86
 

Will somebody care to help me out?

My current HDD is experiencing some strange noise and maybe it is about time that i have to replace it. I am planning to buy an SSD just for the Leopard system disk and all other files will be restored to an external disk.

Will restoring from time machine make my SSD bootable? and do I need to reinstall chameleon on the EFI partition?

Will not conflict with the UUID stuff?

Please somebody shed some light and I know it will be very helpful likewise to others who plan to do the same thing.

Best regards,

Clonezilla

this program clones drives.

small program fits in 250MB USB FLASH stick.

Prepare with HP-USB FLasher program
then boot with USB Stick that you turned into a bootable device.
you may have to press some keys during boot like F8 or F12 depending on our BIOS

You have to install Clonezilla free program in Windows or Linux or even Mac to the USB Stick. Or you can download the .ISO version and burn to CD and run that from DVD Drive. If you don't have windows ready then use the .ISO method. Google the page.
Read the destructions first. There's commandline method as well. Runs on Debian with parted.

Not sure if they have a Mac version,

The other painful method is to use Disk Utility the one you used to setup OSX, this takes quite a bit longer because the file checking procedure. makes an ISO or DMG image of your hardrive.

My worries are on the EFI partition, will clonezilla copy the exact image of the disk, well that includes the partitioning am i right?

I need to copy just the EFI and the OSX partition. My other partitions doesn't need to be cloned anyway.

How about carbon copy cloner? In a couple of days I will be doing this thing.

Best regards,

The EFI System partition is not normally used by Mac OS, although some boot loaders use it. (IIRC, Boot Think puts its stuff there, but I don't know about others.)

I recommend you do four things:

• Use any reliable OS X backup tool to copy the disk's contents to your new disk (either directly or indirectly). I've used Carbon Copy Cloner for this task with good results. This will back up your system, but the resulting disk will not be bootable.
• If you're concerned about the EFI System partition, mount it manually. You can do this in OS X with the "mount" command, but you'll need to know the partition number and you'll need a mount point (an empty directory) handy. Something like "mount /dev/disk0s1 /mount/point" should do the trick. If there are files there, copy them manually. (You can mount the EFI System partition on the new disk in a similar way.)
• Prepare an emergency boot disc. Something like Empire EFI will probably work fine. The idea is to be able to boot your copied OS using the boot loader on the emergency disc rather than your regular boot loader. You can test this with your current disk before you do anything. After copying your files, boot the new disk with your emergency boot disc.
• With the new system booted, re-install your boot loader. Track it down on your original installation medium or on the Web and follow whatever procedure it offers to install it. This may be an automated installer or a set of commands typed in a Terminal screen.

There are other ways to go about this, but this one's pretty flexible, and if something goes wrong, you should at least be able to boot your old system to get on the Web and figure out how to work around the problem.

Thanks,

I already have the carbon copy cloner with me, and almost everything is prepared except the SSD.

Yes, I have chameleon boot loader and I have manually installed it to EFI partition, so I have extras there as well.

No other way to go but again manually install the bootloader on the EFI partition on the new SSD. :)

Clone successful! Done it thru Carbon Copy Cloner, man it was so easy.

1. Formatted the 32Gb SSD on SATA to USB case.
2. Clone my Leopard disk.
3. Removed my Leopard disk and replaced with the SSD 32Gb.
3. Reinstalled the bootloader from iAtkos install disk.
4. Reboot, and Voila!

*KingSpec 32Gb SSD, boots faster than my 5400 rpm HDD.

The real beauty is when you open programs, applications, it just opens so fast... :) it is keeper.