Yay Disk Utility! Boo Quark!

March 10, 2004

This is a no brainer once you've seen it, but if you haven't....

I had client with a G4 with a 10Gb hard disk who needed a larger drive. I had visions of migrating the data over the network to a new drive, then tinkering to get it all working again. I thought I'd heard that Disk Utility had some new things that I hadn't yet played with, so just for grins I opened Disk Utility.

Disk Utility (OS X Panther) has an option "Restore" in the main tabs at the top. This option allows you to restore a disk image, disk or URL to another disk. Pretty slick it seemed— but would it work for an entire OS X boot volume?

So, I set the jumper on the new drive to Slave, and plugged it in to the G4 on top of the existing drive using the secondary IDE connector on the ribbon cable and one of the power cords. After booting from a Panther Installation disk, I took a trip to Disk Utility (File--Open Disk Utility) and after partitioning the new drive I clicked on the Restore tab. Then I dragged the icon of the existing HD from the left onto the Source field and the icon of the newly partitioned drive to the Destination field. I clicked Restore and 30 minutes later it was done.

I shutdown and and pulled the two drives out, set the new drive to Master and installed it in the original HDs place. I hit the power button and it booted right up. The only problems I had were some minor prefs issues due to having given the new drive a different name.

Oh, and QuarkXPress 6.0 didn't like this at all. It made us re-authorize itself by calling Quark. The guy at Quark basically told us not to move Quark like that again— as if we're supposed to leave our computers untouched and without upgrades. Sheesh. It's garbage like this that is causing so many of my clients to switch to Adobe InDesign.