Newbie question

[tripperharrison]

Hello,

I'm new to SuperDuper!, but it looks like a great product.

I have a problem that I was hoping to get some of your help with. I attempted to clone my PowerBook 100GB hard drive last night to a removable Firewire Acomdata 250GB hard drive, formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), partitioned into three spaces: 100GB for the PowerBook, 60GB for my iPod, and the remainder for extra files.

It took about an hour and a half, but it seemed to have copied over all of my files to the 100GB partition on the drive.

I'm new to cloning, and really to back-up in general, and am not sure what it's supposed to look like on the new partition: is it supposed to be a single disc image to boot from, or should I just see all the files that I have on my PowerBook hard drive. I see the files.

Anyway, this morning, when I tried to boot from the Firewire drive to another family member's PowerBook (by re-setting the Startup Disk in System Preferences and then restarting the computer) I saw a question mark for a moment on restart and then the Finder OS symbol and then the computer booted from its own internal drive, and not the Firewire clone.

What am I doing wrong? Did I do something wrong in the cloning process. I seem to have effectively created a full backup of my PowerBook hard drive, but I don't seem to be able to boot from it?

I looked around in the preferences in SuperDuper! and noticed an option in Advanced for creating a Disk Image. Do I need to create a disk image in order for the cloned drive to be bootable? And if so, how do I do this? Where do I create the Image? In the new partition, alongside the cloned files?

Thanks for any help or advice you can give me.

--Chris

[dnanian]

You should see the files, just like you do on the "real" drive.

The reason you can't boot from it is likely because the Acomdata drive isn't fully Mac compatible for boot. Do you know if it uses an Oxford (true) chipset, as opposed to a Prolific or Initio? The latter are known to cause problems, both during copying and during boot...

[tripperharrison]

Thanks,

I thought that might be the issue. I had read that some drives aren't Mac clone compatible.

I'm not sure about the specifics of this drive, and was planning on buying a Lacie drive, but figured I'd try the one I had first to see if I could save some money.

Thanks for your response.

--Chris

[dnanian]

No problem. The main drives that work well have true Oxford chipsets: I'd suggest a LaCie d2/d3, Maxtor OneTouch III (various FireWire models), WiebeTech and most OWC drives (check with them about Oxford... some models use Prolific).

[tripperharrison]

Hi,

Thanks again.

Would this one have the proper chipset, do you think?

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/LaCie/300703U/

[dnanian]

Yes, the Porsche Design LaCie units do have the proper chipset. However, for some reason, they don't like booting if formatted "journaled", so make sure you don't use journaling with this drive.