Mac Forum / General / Hardware / December 2005

I managed to clone the failing hard drive from my son's Powerbook, making a
copy of it onto a firewire external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. I have
checked the "sparse image" which was made of the failing drive, using Data
Rescue 2, in order to confirm that the files and data on the cloned drive
were still recoverable; virtually everything is.

My inquiry concerns just how I should go about restoring the rescued files
and applications to the new Seagate drive which I will be installing in the
Powerbook in a few days. I figure that I'll first have to initialize the
disc and then install OS X on it, from the Mac installation discs. Once that
is done, would things be as easy as using Carbon Copy Cloner in reverse?
That is, have the application pointed to the sparseimage file on the
external drive as the "source" and the new drive with OS X already installed
as the "destination"?

Assuming that this is the way that this is done, would the application know
enough not to overwrite the new OS system (even though the failing drive
also had OS X) with what may be some corrupt or missing data from the cloned
drive? Ideally, I just want to restore whatever files and applications he
had on the old drive, to the new Seagate drive after reinstalling the OS X
software/system.

Alternatively, would the "archive and install" feature of a straightforward
installation accomplish the same thing if I simply had CCC first install the
sparseimage/cloned drive info to the new drive, and then next performed an
install of OS X from the Mac discs afterwards? Obviously, I'm thrilled to
have salvaged the old drive data and files (I've already bought him an
external for backups in order to avoid problems like this in the future),
but I'm a bit unclear as to the reinstall procedure. Things were sure easier
with OS 9 in this regard, as it was mostly a matter of drag and drop from
the backup!!

Thanks for any help!
Paul