Room to move
I’ve finally upgraded the hard drive in the iMac. Although I had an offer to use an external USB drive, in the end I backed it up to a Windows machine, using a mixture of disk images and ditto-created zip files.
I followed the easy instructions at Macworld US and I was done inside 20 minutes (I think, as I wasn’t timing myself). The backing up and restoring of data is much more time-consuming than the actual hard drive swap.
A few tips for success:
- Use a magnetic screwdriver.
- Assuming you’re reinstalling OS X from scratch, it’s best to patch the OS up to the same level as it was previously before restoring user data and prefs, in order to avoid conflicts between user prefs and the OS version.
- Use the command-line tool ditto instead of the finder (zip) or even disk utility (dmg). This Mac OS X Hints tip gives the details. It will happily write out a zip file to a mounted drive on another machine (in my case, on a Windows share). I created a 1.8 GB zip archive of my Pictures folder without any fuss or bother.
Now we have an old, somewhat slow but no-longer-running-out-of hard-drive-space iMac. I can store all of my music on there instead of my Archos, rip Kathy’s CDs, and record my vinyl to MP3 too.