os X library folder copy issue (obviously)

July 27, 2007 1:41 PM

I replaced my girlfriends iBook harddrive, cloned it with Carbon Copy Cloner and none of the preferences transfered over...

So, I hooked up the old hard drive via usb to the laptop with the new drive and tried to copy files from the old library folder to the new one. Obviously, because I'm logged in it won't let me modify the folder. How do I do this? Will I restore all preferences (bookmarks, e-mail, dock size..) by doing this? Thanks!

posted by nonstopflights to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Plug the old drive in and run Migration Assistant (in /Applications/Utilities/). Way easier and more reliable than doing it by hand.
posted by jjg at 1:56 PM on July 27, 2007

If you did a full disk mirror and correctly reimaged, would it not be worth asking the CCC dev. why none of the preferences copied?
posted by dance at 2:33 PM on July 27, 2007

Yeah, something went wrong here with the clone operation. CCC works flawlessly in my experience, and if you duped the entire original drive, then imaged it back onto the new drive, all should be as it was.

Migration assistant is a great idea.
posted by spitbull at 3:20 PM on July 27, 2007

I found CCC to be spotty unless I su'd to root first. It's supposed to perform it's own privilege escalation but I found that it prompted me for my password something like 6 times. Running it as root from the command line worked much better.
posted by chairface at 3:52 PM on July 27, 2007

CCC has worked flawlessly for me (as a data point, I use it to image about a 50-80 Macs a year).

Migration Assistant will usually work okay; the MA that comes with 10.3 is not as reliable as the MA in 10.4. Should be worth a try, though.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:46 PM on July 27, 2007

You may want to use Disk Utility - it's pretty easy and *flawless* (no, really). Here's a brief howto (assuming you have both discs in the same running mac):

1) Start disk utility
2) Pick any hard disk on the left pane
3) Pick "Restore" tab on the right pane
4) Drag the original disk from the left to the "Source" field
5) Drag the target disk from the left to the "Destination" field
6) Check "erase destination" if you want to clean up the destination drive (which is a good idea)
7) Click restore

That will effectively clone the two discs, the right way, no files or permissions left behind.
posted by fredoliveira at 10:32 AM on July 28, 2007

after the first few times CCC crapped out on transferring from an ibook's 60gb to a firewire drive at about 95% to 99%, i did a bit of research on the topic and now i use superduper

it's faster, easier, more reliable in my experience, and i haven't really wanted to look elsewhere. as always if CCC works for you, use it. otherwise, try superduper. just 'redo' the backup and it should work out OK.
posted by toliman at 4:57 AM on August 14, 2007