MBP upgrade: cloning question

[upwalker]

I need to upgrade my MBP’s (almost full) hd, and know I need to make a bootable clone before doing so.
Here’s my dilemma.
I have CCC but haven’t used it yet because everything I read says to use an empty drive for the clone.
The ext drive (not empty) I wanted to use for this bootable clone has never been formatted or partitioned, so is one single partition, I believe. Am I right? It has plenty of room; I don’t want to buy yet another external drive.
Is there a way to safely partition that external drive now, before the clone, without losing anything?

Please advise. Thank you.

 

[djackmac]

You don't need a bootable clone. You can just create an image through disk utility and save to your existing external drive as long as its formatted as Mac OS extended (journaled). Then "IF" you have another Mac you can connect the machine with the new drive (booted to target disk mode) and the external HD to the working machine and then do a restore in disk utility from the saved image to the new drive. If you don't have another working Mac you are still okay but will have to load a clean OS on the new drive after creating a .dmg of the original drive. After loading the OS create a dummy user account then go to utilities/migration assistant and then migrate everything over. Otherwise you could buy and external firewire enclosure for the old drive and then boot to the installer after the new drive is installed. Go to utilites/disk utility and then restore directly from the old drive mounted in the enclosure to the new internal HD.