I brought my MacBook Pro to an authorized Mac service depot to upgrade my internal drive from an 80Gb/5400rpm drive to a 200Gb/7200rpm drive. The service I arranged included a cloning of the data of my existing drive to the new drive so that, other than the sudden increase in available disk space and speed, I would notice no difference.
That was the theory.
As I understand it, the technician used Migration Assistant, a data transfer tool that comes with the Tiger operating system. The process resulted in a new user path on my drive which broke all of the application and data hooks. My environment was a disaster. With the exception of Address Book, all of my applications crashed and reported errors when I started them. I was unable to save data to certain directories in my user environment because I apparently had insufficient privileges. I tried everything I could to fix the environment, drawing on my Unix experience. Nothing worked. Thankfully I still had the original drive in an external chassis and figured out that I could boot to that as an alternative.
By the time 11pm rolled around, I was at my wit’s end. That’s when I took one last look online and discovered Carbon Copy, a shareware tool by Bombich Software that claims to offer the “absolutely best fidelity in the industry“. I rebooted to my original drive, downloaded and installed Carbon Copy and started a drive-to-drive clone of my data. At 1:00am, about 25% into the transfer process, I decided to go to bed.
About twenty minutes ago I bolted out of bed and ran to my computer. Carbon Copy reported that it had done its job and I rebooted to my new internal drive. Sweet success! My system is just as it was before the upgrade, only with a larger and faster drive. All of my applications load, all of my data is accessible and I have privileges to my user environment.
Thank you Carbon Copy!!! A donation has been made.
Whew. Glad to hear that Carbon Copy saved the day for you, Mark, but too bad that the Apple dealer let you down!
Comment by Donna Papacosta — November 15, 2007 @ 4:49 pm
Thanks, Donna. I’m just sooooo relieved that my computer is working at all that I didn’t go after the dealer as I should have.
It’s amazing how dependent we are on our computers and how scary it is when the threat of failure and loss of work kicks in.
Comment by Mark — November 15, 2007 @ 5:08 pm
I’ve been a CCC user for a long time (though SuperDuper! is also a good alternative). That Apple tech should have been too — generally I’ve had good luck with Migration Assistant, but it is NOT a cloning tool, and if you said you wanted your data cloned, that’s what they should have done.
Comment by Derek K. Miller — November 15, 2007 @ 9:47 pm
I've been a CCC user for a long time (though SuperDuper! is also a good alternative). That Apple tech should have been too — generally I've had good luck with Migration Assistant, but it is NOT a cloning tool, and if you said you wanted your data cloned, that's what they should have done.
Comment by Derek K. Miller — December 31, 2009 @ 3:02 am