Migration an existing MacOS 10.4.11 installation to a larger hard drive

dreael

Registered
Dear MacOS X users

There's a iMac G4 with a fairly full HD (there's a 10 GB ATA drive from Quantum in it). I'd like to replace this drive to a larger one but migrate the whole MacOS X installation so I'm looking for a utility like PowerQuest's Partition Magic (and its "brother tool" DriveImage) from the i386/Microsoft world. Such a tool would allow me to temporarily attach the old small disk together on a i386 machine, starting a Linux und run a "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" i.e. just cloning every sector to the target disk and then applying a "Partition Magic" like operation to expand the journaled HFS partition.

If there aren't any such utilities, a way where i can temporarily attach both drives simultaneously on the ATA ribbon, booting from a MacOS installation DVD and going to a single user mode shell to run fdisk and mkfs on the target drive, applying a big piped "tar" command (one process is reading from the source and the other is writing on the target) and then applying a special bootstrap rebuilding command is also fine because it's a one time action.
 
Cabon Copy Cloner. Google it. It works flawlessly. You can even clone a drive while booted from that drive.

Since it's an iMac, I would attach the new hard drive via FireWire (or, less preferrably, USB) in some enclosure, clone the internal to the external, boot from the external just to verify the clone took place without error, then swap 'em.
 
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