I figure I'd post this here for future reference for me, and also to help others out.
Recently my Powerbook hard drive showed hints of having problems. DMA Failure was showing up in logs, a drive scan showed errors, and some programs became corrupted somehow. So, I bought a new 100gb 5400 drive that I intend to install internally (and put the old 80gb 4200 in an enclosure once replaced), and wanted to clone the system. How did I do it?
-Well, first, I got my firewire enclosure and put the 100gb drive into it.
-Next I grabbed
BootCD to make a bootable OS X CD so I had easy terminal and disk utility access. To turn it into a more useful CD, I put in
Rember for memory testing (It's a GUI for memtest ported from memtest86.
-Once I booted from the CD, I ran Disk Utility to create a single large partition on the 100gb disk.
-I then opened terminal, and ran mount to see the /dev devices for the new partiton, and my old disk partition.
-Now, the command that makes cloning easy. asr. It can grab images off any source and use that to restore, or clone two devices. I wanted to clone, so I ran "asr -source /dev/disk0s9 -target /dev/disk3s3 -erase -verbose". What that did was erase the new partiton, did a block by block copy of the disk, but also still kept the partition size the way I set it up, granting me 20 more gigs.
Once it completed, I formatted the bad drive, rebooted off the firewire drive, and found everything as it was. Running disk utility to scan the disk showed the same errors, proving the block for block copy worked as expected. To correct the issues I was seeing from corrupt files, I then booted to my OS X cd, and did an archive and install. For those wondering, think of it as a reinstall on top, but done right. The old OS files are moved to another folder, the new OS is layed down, then the old user accounts and applications are brought in and preserved. I now have a fully functional system again, with no loss of any major data, and everything is in place to move the 100gb drive internal.
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