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Repair guides and disassembly information for Apple's Macintosh personal computers.

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iMac 24" EMC 2134 drive cloned but will not boot

I cloned the existing 500 GB drive to a 2TB Seagate Barrcuda with Superduper and replaced the original with the cloned drive. It will not boot and instead I see a folder with a question mark. It will boot from the original drive and a verify of the cloned drive shows the volume to be OK. Do I need to do something to tell the MAC to use that drive before swapping out the original? If I select that external as the startup disk from inside the OS and it doesn't boot will I be able to go back? I named both drives "Macintosh HD" when cloning. Thanks.

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Verify found no problems but I did a repair anyway. It said repair complete and that is updated boot partitions as required. Will be swapping out the original with this one again to see if the repair made any difference. I can browse all files just fine when attached as an external. Thanks.

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I used the startup manager, I was able to select the external drive (the clone of the original) and boot from it. It booted fine. I took out the original to be sure and it still booted from the external fine. I put the cloned drive hooked up internally and it will not boot. Possible SATA restriction 1.5 GB? I put a jumper on it per the manufacturer but it didn't help. I'm going to try a different jumper. It makes no sense that the original drive boots internally (tells me no problems with cables) and that the system boots from the cloned drive externally (tells me the cloned drive is good. Any ideas?

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You really need to use Apple's Migration Assistant Application to do it right. Super Duper has problems with the larger HD's. - Start again, once you have it imaged go into your system prefs and select the new HD (don't alter your setup yet!) re-start your system if your new HD is working correctly it should be the first listed on the desktop.

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I'm not sure if I'm doing it correctly but the Migration Assistant doesn't seem to offer the option of copying the original drive, installed internally, to the new drive connected externally via USB. So, I'm using Time Machine to do a backup to the external drive. I'm assuming it's a full clone?

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Thanks Dan. On further reading I didn't think Time Machine was cloning so I interrupted it. Instead I booted to the recovery HD and am using Restore from the disk utility to clone from the original HD to the new external.

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Hold on here, your going to many directions here!

Lets start again your system is intact with it's current HD in place and all is well - Correct? OK, if that is so how are you going to replace the HD and copy over the files? you have a few options here.

One way is to make a FULL COMPLETE Time Machine backup. Then restore from it. But, you will need to install a fresh copy of OS on your new HD when you swap the HD's over. Do you have the original OS-X DVD? If not this won't get you very far.

A better way is to get an external Firewire case to hold your new HD in, then use Migration assistant to copy the full image of your current HD over. A variation of this is if you have a new system setting the old system in disk mode acting like an external case held HD then using a firewire cable between the systems image the old system over to the new system.

Yes, you can use a USB connected case Vs a firewire case just takes more time.

Last way is via a network connection (Ethernet) to a file server so hold the imaged HD files then restoring it to the new system. Again, you will need to have your OS-X DVD to do this.

Instead of having your OS-X DVD you could have another external HD or SSD/USB thumb drive device as a bootable OS-X with the needed application files.

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Yes, the system is intact with current HD in place and all is well. Unfortunately I do not have the original OS-X DVD. I discovered that the partition on the new HD was not set up as a GUID partition table. When I repartitioned and then imaged the files over the new drive was bootable. Dan, thanks for your help and with sticking with me. Your guidance was helpful.

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Happy it worked - Please mark this as resolved and give it a score if you think it would help others.

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