Changing OSX on USB Drive to Dual Boot on Main Drive

[NYC Coyote]

I just installed OSX 10.4.8 onto a usb drive and installed all patches necessary to get everything running. Wanted to make sure I didn't fry my main hard drive on my laptop.

 

Now that I have it all running perfectly, I want to move it over to the internal harddrive on my laptop.

 

I used partition magic to create 20 gigs of empty space and installed Acronis OS Selector.

 

I also have macdrive installed so I can see all the files on that usb drive.

 

Is there an easy way to "ghost" the available data on the usb drive to the 20 gig of space on the internal?

 

And would Acronis simply see it then?

[NYC Coyote]

Ok.....did a little more testing here.

 

With Acronis installed I simply rebooted with the usb drive attached and it was able to see the OSX on the external drive.

 

So I'm thinking this, and please help if you have any other suggestions as I'm new at this.

 

I can do the who diskpart thing but stop after I create the partition WITHOUT making it the first boot (I have acronis already):

 

DISKPART> list disk

 

 

DISKPART> select disk n

 

 

DISKPART> create partition primary id=af

 

THEN......and this is the part I'm really unsure of...

 

Go into my copy of OSX.....into the disk director.....and format that partition to Mac Journaled.

 

Reboot back into windows.......and because I have MacDrive installed simply copy the entire contents of the external which currently houses the OS X to the newly formatted Mac partition on my internal hard drive.

 

Then I think the next time I go into the Mac OS I may have to do the re-permissioning thing but I'm not sure about that either.

 

Does this all sound correct to anyone? If this works like this it would be a good way to test new versions that come out such as 10.4.5, and when you are through testing on the external, since the work was already done on the pc, simply erase the files and copy from the external again.

[NYC Coyote]

Well.....it didn't work. Now I can't boot from the internal hard drive. Thankfully the partitions are still there and I have the external Mac OS which I'm using now to be on the internet.

So now I'm copying my internal data partition as well as my windows partition (hopefully it still is functional) so I can just replace everything once I redo the whole damn thing.

 

Making this a dual boot from the beginning this time!!!!!

[Headrush69]

Just download CloneTool Hatchery and run it from the USB OS X installation and copy it into the new partition on your internal drive.

Then do whatever steps are needed for your bootloader to boot from that partition. (I don't use Acronis so can't help there)