How To Clone your Drive!

[cry0gen]

Simple guide, So some pre-requisites..

A) Carbon Copy Cloner. -- Found at the Link below

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

startupfiletool. -- Found at the link below

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...mp;#entry166040

 

This guide is for cloning on a non EFI partitioned drive!

 

Make sure you have the blank drive you want to clone the drive to partitioned properly with "MBR" partition scheme. You can set this under the "options" button in diskutil.

 

After you've partitioned your drive properly, assuming you have 1 partition you will need to make that partition active, so launch fdisk.

fdisk -e /dev/rdisk?

Where ? is the disk number of the new disk you wish to make bootable.

Now you'll want to set the partition active for boot,

fdisk: 1> p

Just print it out to make sure there is no "EFI" partition first. Now just flag partition 1 like so.

fdisk: 1> f 1

It should say something along the lines this drive has been flagged for boot.

Now all you need to do is update it and write then quit.

fdisk: 1> update
fdisk: 1> write
fdisk: 1> quit

Should now be back at a prompt.

 

Now that the disk editing has been completed you will want to launch carbon copy cloner.

Make sure your options in carbon copy cloner look like this.

.

Now, after you've made sure your preferences look like that, we can continue with the process.

On your source disk, select the drive that is actually working, or running right now. As the source disk. On mine it was XorlFS. And now, select the new drive with whatever partition you want on it. Which should be named whatever you named it in diskutil.

Now to start the cloning above you will see where it says "Click Here" click that and put in your administrative password.

Then click clone, wait a while, took me about 30-40 minutes for 20 some odd gigs. So if you have more expect more time, simple as that. Now we assume that you've completed the closing process. We will move onto making the drive bootable. (with darwin bootloader).

First you will need to dd the bootloader into place.

dd if=/usr/standalone/i386/boot1h of=/dev/disk?s? bs=512 count=1

This will DD the boot1h to the first 512 bytes of the 1st and only partition selected, mine was disk1s1, make sure you select the right one. Now, there is a second step to that, this involves the tool startupfiletool, I said to grab earlier. Copy the binary that's unzipped to /usr/sbin.

sudo cp -rf /path/to/where/you/unzipped/startupfiletool /usr/sbin/

Now we can run the last and final command.

/usr/sbin/startupfiletool /dev/rdisk#s? /usr/standalone/i386/boot

Where # is the disk number, and ? is the partition, usually 1 as in the case of this tutorial.

Now you should have a 100% bootable cloned disk. Now you can reboot in your bios set boot priority to that disk and test it out if it doesnt work, post back here with what happens and or go on irc #osx86.

 

thanks to jsrdead for startupfiletool, and sportsman for his boot guides.

[macgirl]

Thanks, but there is a HowTo in the Tutorials section: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=30322

 

Did you search first before posting?

[cry0gen]

Well after paroosing his post, All I see is that it's about restoring boot to pre-migrated drives. Not the migration process, also, mine is a lot simpler and explains the migration process.

Edited December 25, 2006 by cry0gen