From the Erase section, erase the hard disk.ĥ. Select the destination drive within Disk Utility, and click on Erase. Open Disk Utility from your boot drive -> Applications folder -> Utilities folder.Ĥ. Note, this drive can not have any data content you want to preserve, since this procedure overwrites the entire drive.ģ. Ensure that the destination drive you want to backup to is available on the desktop. Create an admin user in Apple menu -> System Preferences -> Accounts with no Startup Items, and log into it.Ģ. Booting from the installer disk is usually done with the startup manager: If you find something in the following procedure which could be edited, please sign the guestbook:ġ. A reader of this article suggested it might be better to do this procedure by booting off the installer disk, which has Disk Utility in the Utilities menu of Tiger, and previous operating systems in the File menu. It has not been tested with any other version. The procedure outlined below can be done with Disk Utility in Mac OS X 10.4.2. If it does, chances are the clone is easily recoverable. The purpose of making the drive bootable is that you can test the most basic function of the operating system in the clone to see if it will work as well as the original. Note, with Mac OS X, backups which are bootable only include Firewire drives, and drives on an IDE bus recognizable by the system as a bootable drive. With Disk Utility the procedure of the permissions is similar, and will be outlined below. With some software like Retrospect by EMC, you create a clone using a duplicate command and selecting the source and destination volume, once you make sure the permissions are set right.

It also has been called mirroring a hard drive. Note: Users with T-1 or newer chips must have their security turned off for the cloning procedures to work.Ĭloning is the procedure by which you create a backup that is identical to a bootable system on an external drive. Tech support jobs.įAQ is the acronym for Frequently Answered Questions. Need computer help? Book now to resolve most computer issues. How to clone a disk with Disk Utility for the Macĭownload my résumé as a Word compressed zip file and Adobe Acrobat.

Mac disk copy utility