Super Duper Saved My Bacon

A couple or three weeks ago, I picked up a 250 GB internal drive to replace the pathetically mall 50 GB drive that came in the wife's older model Macbook. 

A couple days ago, I finally got all the stuff off my old Firewire drive and onto the Drobo, which meant that I could take and use the firewire drive as a clone. 

This was the step that I had been waiting for, and has been the cause, or rather the catalyst for a number of recent problems I've had. (The G4 NAS stopped working while I was trying to transfer stuff from the Firewire drive). 

I tried doing a clone with Super Duper to a sparse disk image, but I couldn't get the computer to recognize it, so I had to clean the drive off and clone to that.

And I'm so happy I went to the effort. Because it turned into a bit of an adventure. 

Changing hard drives on a Macbook is dead simple. Loose three screws. Pull out an L bracket. Pull out the old drive. Attach new drive to sled. Insert new drive. Put computer together. 

However, when I was putting in the new drive, something went wrong. Maybe I aimed wrong. Maybe I didn't tighten the screws enough. But the rubber guides that the drive slides in on came lose and bunched up at the end of the drive bay. Great. After trying to see if I could gently get the drive in with these lose, I gave up and pulled the computer apart and glued the rubber guides down (or rather, the wife did; I'm so proud of her. She has much finer motor control, so she was much better working with the 3 mm screws....)

That took all of four hours to finally get working and then, and then, after all that hassle, I couldn't find the install disks for my wife's machine. No problem. I'll use my install disks. They're both Macbooks, right? Wrong! Because hers is an iteration or two back, I got "could not install on this system". 

Yay!

What to do?

Boot from the Firewire drive (holding down F; option key wasn't working), and then clone the old system back onto the new drive. 

It wasn't pretty, and I really wanted to do a fresh install on the OS (as there are some issues with her machine), but she's got her computer back, and she's not going to kill me. 

So, thank you Super Duper! for being dead simple to use, and, in my experience, pretty well bulletproof.