Cloning your Mac to Firewire.

by David Sudjiman ~ January 25th, 2008. Filed under: Mac.

I recently bought external Firewire HD for my backup purpose. Why Firewire? Because it’s the only supported interface that Apple Mac can boot from external device.

This is the step-by-step how-to to clone your HD to your external Firewire HD using Carbon Copy Cloner and it supports Leopard compared to SuperDuper.

Once you are ready with your new external Firewire HD, in this example I’m using LaCie d2 Quadra 500GB, plugin the Firewire 800 cable to your Mac Book Pro and it will auto mount.

Open your Disk Utility application and repartition it. This step is optional. The reason I’m doing this because I need to create similar partition size like my Mac Book Pro 160GB HD (MBP). In this example, I can create 2 160GB partitions and 1 around 145GB partition. I still can use the 145GB to clone my 160GB as my MBP is not fully occupied.

For easier reference, I will change the first partition to the date I make my HD clone.

Turn off your applications and your wireless or your network so that you won’t change your HD state.

Open up your Carbon Copy Cloner, choose the correct settings and you are good to go!

Once you finished reboot your. Once it’s rebooting, press OPTION button and then you will see several options where to boot from. Choose your Firewire clone to boot up from your external Firewire HD.

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3 Responses to Cloning your Mac to Firewire.

  1. sufehmi
    January 26th, 2008 at 12:44 am

    Why Firewire? Because it’s the only supported interface that Apple Mac can boot from external device.
    .
    Hopefully this will begin to change with Macbook Air (which hasn’t got firewire)

  2. Oskar Syahbana
    January 27th, 2008 at 3:54 pm

    Er… no. I’m using USB harddisk and my mac can boot just fine from that. Slow yes, but running just fine. Firewire upside against USB2 is it’s just faster and that’s if you’re using Firewire 800.

    USB2 max speed 480 Mbit/s
    Firewire 400 max speed 400 Mbit/s
    Firewire 800 max speed around 800Mbit/s

    So unless you’re buying LaCie’s external HD that usually come with Firewire 800, going with USB is a better choice.

    (Maxtor or Seagate external HD that is equipped with Firewire port is usually Firewire 400, not 800 hence slower than USB2).

  3. Oskar Syahbana
    January 27th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    Woopsie.. wrong formatting, I actually wanted to quote this statement: “Why Firewire? Because it’s the only supported interface that Apple Mac can boot from external device.”

    Sorry LOL

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