[sirtronics]

I have a working copy (OS 10.5.7) on a 16GB SSD and want to make a "perfect" copy to my external HD just in case. So when I "play" and screw it up I can do an easy restore. I have used Carbon Capy clone but when I test the external HD it is not bottable and comes up with "operating system missing"
what am I missing????
also what wil be the best way to "restore" this information when I do screw up the SSD.

[grassle]

run netbookinstaller (assuming you have an nbi install on the source ssd) after cloning on the clone.

Restore is just cloning back again, even from the booted clone. might need another NBI run on the ssd.

[nobo_mini]

I've had no issues with using SuperDuper! and booting of the clones it makes. No need to rerun NBI on the clone. Saved me after a mistake on my part during update from 10.6.1 to .2.

[psaux]

Okay ... assuming for some reason you don't want to just use Time Machine .... and assuming your external HD is big enough to hold a complete image of the SSD, and if you're conversant with unix and/or a careful person, you could pull an exact image of the SSD, including the mbr, partition table, filesystems, etc... by using dd.

0) Make sure you have your external drive connected, and that you don't care about anything already on it.
1) Open a terminal (applications->utilities-> yadda yadda) and become root. (you can do this via "sudo -s" (don't type the quotes)
2) Type in "mount" (again not with quotes)
3) In the list of information "mount" spat out, you need to find two things:
a) a line that says /dev/disk[something] on / ([a list of things here]) ... the "on / " is the crucial part to look for .. that means it's your main drive in the system.
b) a line that says /dev/disk[something else] on /Volumes/[yet another something else]
4) The stuff before the "on" sections of those two lines are the pieces we care about ... when we use them in the next line, leave off the "s[some number]" portion from the end of both, ok? (This is important.)
5) Bearing in mind that typing this wrong could easily destroy your system, carefully type this, filling in the sections in square brackets with what we looked up above.: "dd if=[The /dev/disk entry from the 3a instruction above] of=[The /dev/disk entry from the 3b instruction above]"
Be certain not to switch the "if" and "of" portions. They mean "input file" and "output file" ... and the input must be your main disk and the output must be your external.
For example, on my system this would be:
"dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1"
Yours is _likely_ to be the same, but not necessarily.

6) Wait. Once this finishes you should have an exact duplicate on the external drive.

[sirtronics]

I tried this method and everything went smooth but then I shutdown the machine and tried to bbot of the external hard drive and I get the same error "opertrating system not found"
What am I missing???

Can I burn it to a DVD instead?

Originally Posted by nobo_mini

I've had no issues with using SuperDuper! and booting of the clones it makes. No need to rerun NBI on the clone. Saved me after a mistake on my part during update from 10.6.1 to .2.

[psaux]

sirtronics, what I proposed accomplishes a byte-for-byte duplication of the whole drive, which means, unless you're trying to change to a media type which requires a different booting procedure (say like a CD or DVD), which isn't the case here, it's almost guaranteed to work. AFAIK the other methods are all filesystem-level duplications, which are likely to omit the bootsector and related juju.

[sirtronics]

OK I tried it and I got permission denied !

Originally Posted by psaux

Okay ... assuming for some reason you don't want to just use Time Machine .... and assuming your external HD is big enough to hold a complete image of the SSD, and if you're conversant with unix and/or a careful person, you could pull an exact image of the SSD, including the mbr, partition table, filesystems, etc... by using dd.

0) Make sure you have your external drive connected, and that you don't care about anything already on it.
1) Open a terminal (applications->utilities-> yadda yadda) and become root. (you can do this via "sudo -s" (don't type the quotes)
2) Type in "mount" (again not with quotes)
3) In the list of information "mount" spat out, you need to find two things:
a) a line that says /dev/disk[something] on / ([a list of things here]) ... the "on / " is the crucial part to look for .. that means it's your main drive in the system.
b) a line that says /dev/disk[something else] on /Volumes/[yet another something else]
4) The stuff before the "on" sections of those two lines are the pieces we care about ... when we use them in the next line, leave off the "s[some number]" portion from the end of both, ok? (This is important.)
5) Bearing in mind that typing this wrong could easily destroy your system, carefully type this, filling in the sections in square brackets with what we looked up above.: "dd if=[The /dev/disk entry from the 3a instruction above] of=[The /dev/disk entry from the 3b instruction above]"
Be certain not to switch the "if" and "of" portions. They mean "input file" and "output file" ... and the input must be your main disk and the output must be your external.
For example, on my system this would be:
"dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1"
Yours is _likely_ to be the same, but not necessarily.

6) Wait. Once this finishes you should have an exact duplicate on the external drive.

[psaux]

sirtronics, did you perhaps skip the "become root" part of the process? (Second part of step 1) The simplest way to do this is to type "sudo -s", which will then cause you to be prompted for your password. Assuming you authenticate successfully, you will now have the properties of the root user, which means you'll have permission to modify/access anything on the system. That said, great care should obviously be exercised when operating in this mode, as typos will hurt. Check what you've written before hitting return while you're being root, and exit from being root as soon as you're done with what you need to do. (typing "exit" should do that BTW)

[sirtronics]

No , I did type sudo -s was propmted for password ( there is none)
and then typed the rest.

Originally Posted by psaux

sirtronics, did you perhaps skip the "become root" part of the process? (Second part of step 1) The simplest way to do this is to type "sudo -s", which will then cause you to be prompted for your password. Assuming you authenticate successfully, you will now have the properties of the root user, which means you'll have permission to modify/access anything on the system. That said, great care should obviously be exercised when operating in this mode, as typos will hurt. Check what you've written before hitting return while you're being root, and exit from being root as soon as you're done with what you need to do. (typing "exit" should do that BTW)

[reflex]

I expect you're getting ''permission denied" because the target drive needs to be unmounted before it can be copied to. I don't use OSX, but from what I've read, it looks like the terminal command would be "diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX" (with sudo/root permissions, and where diskX is your target disk). Unmounting it from the GUI may work, too.



I've used a procedure similar to the one recommended by psaux to create drive images on Linux. But I'd recommend performing the clone after booting off a another drive (like a LiveCD), because it can be problematic to image/clone at a low-level when the drive is in use.

I'm also not sure if the end result will be bootable. It will be a perfect copy, but the move to an external drive may make it unbootable. For example, in Linux, traditionally the root filesystem was specified by a device name like "/dev/sda1", but those device names change, depending on how drives are hooked up. And a changed device name means an unbootable system. I don't know how OSX would deal with the situation.

You might be better off just saving an image of the hackintosh install, then it can be restored if needed. You can use a similar "dd" command, except the output file will be a file.

To create a drive image, I'd boot off a Linux Live CD, then issue a command like "sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=drive.img", that'll save an image of the drive to a file named "drive.img" in the current directory (change the current dir to a USB drive or something prior to the command). The image will be uncompressed (a 16GB image file for a 16GB SSD). You can compress as the image is created, but if you have the disk space, you can leave the compression for later (the Atom makes compression slow, so when I imaged my drive, I compressed the image afterwards on my Core 2).


...and if you want to proceed with a clone anyway:

I'd boot off a Linux LiveCD, then issue a command like this "sudo dd if=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD2000BJKT-00F4T0_XXXXXXXXXX of=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_2500BEVExternal_XXXXXXXXXXX".

The "/dev/disk/by-id" directory has a list of drives and partitions by interface, then id, then serial number. It makes the device names long, but there's little chance of screwing them up (my example unambiguously images a internal (ata prefix) Western Digital 200GB drive to a USB 250GB). You could use a simpler command, like "sudo if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb", but that's easier to screw up. It might also be a good idea to mount the source drive (readonly), before proceeding with the imaging, because the system should prevent you from writing to a mounted drive (say if you mixup the source and target drives).

Also, be aware that this technique performs no filesystem or partition resizing. So, the target drive has to be at least as big as the source, and in the end, the partitions on the target drive might be undersized. For example, cloning a 16GB SSD to a 120GB HDD will leave you with 100+ GB of unpartitioned space. It's possible to grow filesystems/partitions into unpartitioned space, but it's gonna be more awkward on a hackintosh.