[countdrachma]

Thanks Jeff. That sounds logical and a good safe way to go about it as even if the MBP hard drive fails to reformat correctly etc, I would still have a fully functional version bootable off the external drive. What I'm not sure of though is that if you do a Carbon Copy Clone to a newly (correctly formated GPT external drive), does a Carbon Copy Clone copy the partition format as well? If so, when cloning the existing MBP MBR disk to the newly created GPT external disk, will the clone process make the external drive MBR as part of the process? I'm not really sure enough about how partition formats work and if they are susceptible to cloning. Any thoughts? Thanks again.