Cables and Software Cloning a Hard Drive...

[Elfen]

Though I recently did this on a MacBook Pro with FireWire, this can be (and has been) done on a G3 and G4 iBooks & PowerBooks. It also works on Desktop Macs with FireWire.

Situation: A friend and Mac Repair client, a lady in her 90s, is going blind (Macular degeneration), so I set up a MacBook with a 48in LCD screen for her to see the text, icons and windows better. She can and she's happy with the set up. Thing is she gets relatives who come in and screw up the settings on her machine and I have to go there and set them straight. Even after talking to her relatives about setting it up the setting again so she can read the screen, What can I say, they're uncaring idiots. So she got them a MacBook Pro for them to hack with so they can leave her system alone.

She got a MacBook Pro (I think it's an '09) from a Flea Market for $200. It had problems. Bent case, CD ROM does not boot or load CDs, and a Yosemite Upgrade gone bad - Apple icon, grey process bar, slight nudge on the process bar, reboot, repeat.

I have another friend with a similar MacBook Pro which she lent out for the cause.

At this point it becomes simple - get a firewire cable, turn on the broken MacBook Pro in FireWire Mode, connect to other with FireWire cable. Format the target drive with Disk Tools and use a program like Clone Carbon Copy to clone the working hard drive to the non-working hard drive, and then wait...

If the cloning process went without complaints or problems, the problem system will be fixed as an evil clone of the host system. The problem here is reseting user accounts and deleting applications and personal files until you get a bare system.

The question is, can this cloning process be done on USB or Network?

 

[bibilit]

Don't know about cloning, but a USB install is pretty easy.

 

[Elfen]

Care to share? I have never been able to do it through USB, and I do not know why.

 

[Cory5412]

On an Intel based Mac: USB booting and cloning works exactly the same as Firewire.

On a PowerPC-based Mac, only a pretty limited set of systems can boot from USB, and they can only really easily do OS 9 from it. With some OF trickery, that i don't know off hand, you can boot OS X via USB, but it's not particularly fun or pretty.

It can't easily be done over a network. If you have a Mac OS X Server you can set up NetBoot, but another solution is what I do. Install OS X onto a big flash drive (and be ready to rebuild it from time to time because OS X will totally kill flash drives it's booted from) and then connect to a server, use CCC/SuperDuper to make a DMG file, store it on your file server.

On the deployee, boot OS X from the flash drive, connect to the file server, use CCC/SuperDuper to write the image out to the disk. It's the same as using a physical disk as a target, you just happen to be unable to boot a DMG from a network file server.

 

[bibilit]

Care to share? I have never been able to do it through USB, and I do not know why.

No problem, here is the guide:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/apple-in-the-enterprise/how-to-create-a-bootable-usb-to-install-os-x/

the option to boot an Intel or Power Pc Mac is found here:

I have been able to boot and install a few computers including a Clamshell lately;

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/25714-ibook-g3-clamshell/