Transfering Snow Leopard to another computer

[Sotirios Papakonstantinou]

Hello! Most of us that have successfully installed Snow Leopard 10.6 on our PC, know this wasn't a very easy process. In fact we lost many hours trying to figure things out and make it work. So, if we want to install Snow Leopard in another computer, do we have to go all that trouble again? Is there a way to "restore" our Snow Leopard installation (with all the applications) to another disk and then modify some files to make it work in the new computer? I'm thinking of deleting the EFI partition and create it again using the appropriate kexts etc. Is that enough?

 

In Windows one can make a Ghost image (or equivalent), restore in another disk and then "restore Windows" using the Windows CD-ROM to make it work again. After initial successful boot he just installs new drivers and he is good to go. Can something like that done to MacOS X?

 

Thank you in advance.

 

PS: It would be cool to transfer the installation to a Virtual machine in VMWare, say, so it will work unmodified in any computer with VMWare installed. Can this be done?

[neil43]

Yes this is possible. Probability of success is greater when the architecture to the of the new machine is similar to the original machine. In a nut shell you clone the hard disk using Carbon Copy Cloner (or similar software). You would do a GUID format in disk utility then clone the new drive in the block copy mode if possible. If you have to do a file by file clone, you will need to install a boot loader on the new drive for sure.

 

But with the newer "installers", starting from scratch with a retail install is not that bad.

 

neil.

[Sotirios Papakonstantinou]

I was thinking of connecting the target disk, boot into Snow Leopard, format the target in GUID scheme with one partition (for single boot) or two partitions (for dual boot). Then use Disk Utility to "restore" the Snow Leopard partition on the target disk. I don't mind about formating and creating the EFI partition again, as I will have to include the new kexts anyway. This looks like a lot faster and easier than installing Snow Leopard to the target computer from scratch...

 

I wonder if I could also "restore" Windows 7 in a dual boot scenario. I could clone the Windows partition with Norton Ghost before "restoring" the Snow Leopard partition, to make sure Ghost will not get confused by the unknown partition type and screw it! Then, if I need to "restore" Windows, I would make sure the Windows partition is the active partition and try "restore" it. I guess again I would have to do it before "restoring" Snow Leopard, just to play safe.

 

But I would appreciate if someone could verify that these actions will work. It would save a lot of time, especially after one has installed Microsoft Office for Mac, Roxio Toast, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop etc. To do it all over again it would need two or three days effort!

 

Thank you in advance.

[srs5694]

My suspicion is that this will be much more likely to work with OS X than with Windows. Windows is very fussy about its hardware and boot partition. When its hardware changes, Windows tends to end up rebooting to install new drivers, then booting a little further the next time when it repeats the process, and so on for a dozen or more reboots. In the end, you'll have spent half a day babysitting the thing and there's a good chance it'll hose itself in the end. Then there's the "Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA)" or whatever other euphemistic name Microsoft is using for more recent anti-piracy systems; if you're using a legitimate copy of Windows (not one that's been pirated and had these tools disabled), Windows may refuse to work once its hardware changes too much; so even if it's technically possible to do it in Windows, the software is, essentially, crippled to prevent this.

 

In both cases, as neil43 suggests, you're more likely to get it to work if your new or upgraded system is similar to the original -- the same CPU, motherboard chipset, etc. The more two systems deviate, the more likely it is that you'll run into a nearly insurmountable problem with drivers -- the ones you need may not be present, and the old ones may cause system misbehavior. Installers are designed to work around such problems by detecting (or enabling manual selection of) the right drivers.

[MacUser2525]

I was thinking of connecting the target disk, boot into Snow Leopard, format the target in GUID scheme with one partition (for single boot) or two partitions (for dual boot). Then use Disk Utility to "restore" the Snow Leopard partition on the target disk. I don't mind about formating and creating the EFI partition again, as I will have to include the new kexts anyway. This looks like a lot faster and easier than installing Snow Leopard to the target computer from scratch...

 

I wonder if I could also "restore" Windows 7 in a dual boot scenario. I could clone the Windows partition with Norton Ghost before "restoring" the Snow Leopard partition, to make sure Ghost will not get confused by the unknown partition type and screw it! Then, if I need to "restore" Windows, I would make sure the Windows partition is the active partition and try "restore" it. I guess again I would have to do it before "restoring" Snow Leopard, just to play safe.

 

But I would appreciate if someone could verify that these actions will work. It would save a lot of time, especially after one has installed Microsoft Office for Mac, Roxio Toast, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop etc. To do it all over again it would need two or three days effort!

 

Thank you in advance.

 

No clue on the windows but the diskutil method will work fine only thing being you will have two computers named identically so one will always show up as say User's MacPro (2) or the like in Finder.

[2o2]

Time machine is ur best bet, ive done this before and it works perfectly

[Sotirios Papakonstantinou]

Well thank you for your suggestions. Yes, I know the hardware must be close for it to work. I tried once to transfer a Windows installation on a rather different hardware and the "restore" method didn't work. As for the Time Machine in Mac, this requires to install Snow Leopard first, so the benefit is not that large. Having two computers with the same name is not a problem, you can always change the computer name, create a new user account and delete the original account etc. I don't mind reinstalling Windows (I would rather avoid it, but I would reinstall them if necessary), but I would rather avoid reinstall Snow Leopard since it takes too much effort to make it compatible with a normal PC and having installed too many applications makes matters worse if I have to do that all over again.

[mschilling]

You can use Disk Utility to restore your hdd to another drive. You can make an image, and then restore that image onto another hdd. Reinstall Chameleon onto the new hdd, and it should work identically to your source hdd. I've also tried Acronis which has an option for a block by block hdd clone. The two hdds have to be the same size (or target could be larger) for it to work, but it took a long time. In that case the result hdd clone did boot (without reinstalling Chameleon), and it probably would work with a dual boot source hdd too.

[Sotirios Papakonstantinou]

I have used Arconis only a couple of times through Digiwiz MiniPE, so I didn't knew it can clone a disk block-by-block. I mostly use Norton Ghost (I'm more familiar with it) which doesn't understand the MacOS HFS file system and could corrupt it if trying anything. Block-by-block feature it ideal since it is independent of the file system, but as you say, and as I suspect, works only for cloning the entire disk, not partitions. That is if the target is larger, you should get some free space at the end which later can be added to the second partition (Windows in my case). So I could do that, but the Snow Leopard partition will be the same size, so anyone wanting to take advantage of a larger disk will have to use it for the second partition only.

 

Thank you anyway.