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Creating bootable backup with non-new hard drive?

I am about to upgrade my 120 GB macbook hard drive to a 500 GB hard drive I recently purchased. I was going to follow these instructions: http://www.macinstruct.com/node/130 and create a bootable drive on a WD fire-wire drive I have.

My question is that the WD fire-wire drive (1 TB) already has about 500 GB of media files on it, so can I still create a bootable back up to it without destroying these files?

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Thanks so much for your help!

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If the drive was not set up with 2 partitions originally, then no. There's no way you can add a bootable partition to this drive without overwriting it's current data. The only way is using a utility like Drive Genius to repartition the drive on the fly, without overwriting the original partition.

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+ even though it would be MS-DOS would BootCamp create a usable partition?

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Yes it would. But that would't work for a bootable Mac OS clone. The PO did not mention cloning a Bootcamp Partition.

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Maj - just throwing out some thoughts as it's Friday ;-) If you did a partition with boot camp could you install a Mac OS onto it and boot from it? BTW - I didn't mention cloning either

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I have never tried it, nor will I try it in the future. Like u mentioned, the partition would be created in MS_DOS Format. Not exactly Mac OS friendly.

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