So this seems really weird to me. I'm writing this on my Powerbook, but I'm booted from an external drive. I went to Best Buy and grabbed a 300 Gig Firewire drive (big enough for us to back up multiple Powerbooks on). Partitioned it, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my laptop drive onto a partition. The entire honking drive - just cloned it right over. It took a while (I wasn't timing it, but I had time to clean the kitchen, load the dishwasher, make Karin's lunch for tomorrow and do some magazine reading.)
So that finished. Turn off the Mac, turn it back on while holding down the Option Key and blam - up pops a little menu listing the bootable drives. I booted off the firewire drive and now everything is running just spiffy - just no longer on a drive of debatable provenance. I actually just changed the wallpaper so I could be sure to keep track of which disk I was using. Desktop, mail, web bookmarks everything came over just fine.
So now in theory I can let Apple replace the internal HD, get it back and just resume business as usual.
I don't know - somehow cloning the entire OS install like that just felt weird. And the fact that this drive can simultaneously support multiple laptops - bizarre. I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect I could take this drive and boot Karin's laptop - into my OS, my crazy preferences and my email file. (I'll try that tomorrow if Apple keeps Kool-Aid overnight.)
If I actually have my desktop, all my data, and all my applications on an external hard drive I can connect to any Firewire Mac and boot up well that just means I'm talking to you from the FUTURE baby!
So that finished. Turn off the Mac, turn it back on while holding down the Option Key and blam - up pops a little menu listing the bootable drives. I booted off the firewire drive and now everything is running just spiffy - just no longer on a drive of debatable provenance. I actually just changed the wallpaper so I could be sure to keep track of which disk I was using. Desktop, mail, web bookmarks everything came over just fine.
So now in theory I can let Apple replace the internal HD, get it back and just resume business as usual.
I don't know - somehow cloning the entire OS install like that just felt weird. And the fact that this drive can simultaneously support multiple laptops - bizarre. I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect I could take this drive and boot Karin's laptop - into my OS, my crazy preferences and my email file. (I'll try that tomorrow if Apple keeps Kool-Aid overnight.)
If I actually have my desktop, all my data, and all my applications on an external hard drive I can connect to any Firewire Mac and boot up well that just means I'm talking to you from the FUTURE baby!