CLONING THE HARD DISK

Cloning your hard disk is good for two reasons. First is as a complete backup of your hard disk. The second reason is to migrate to a bigger hard disk. For windows, there are a few softwares available such as Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. I used Norton Ghost 14 to clone my Windows XP partition and both my data and backup partition to my new 500GB hard disk. For OSX, Norton Ghost won't work since it is a HFS partition. For Mac you can use either SuperDuper (Shareware) or Carbon Copy Cloner (Donationware). I used Carbon Copy Cleaner to clone my OSX partition, since I felt very lazy to do a complete reinstallation of the OSX to my new hard disk.

Since I have already put in the 500GB hard disk in the MSI Wind, I booted my OSX partition on my old 160GB hard disk via USB. It booted well and my new Dell 1390 miniPCI wifi card was immediately detected. Opened the network configuration. Added a new network configuration with Airport and the icon came out and it began to search for any wifi network. My home wifi network was detected immediately. Punch in the WEP key and I began surfing wirelessly. I open the Mac OS Device info, the card was detected as a third party wireless card. No other information available.

Then started the cloning process using Carbon Copy Cloner to my new 500GB hard disk which was already installed in the McWindTosh. It took about one hour for it to complete. After completion, I restart the computer again. It failed to boot!!!! No problem. Ubuntu Live 8.04 USB stick is available with me. I used it to boot the notebook and put the Win XP partition to boot instead of the OSX partition. With the Darwin bootloader I managed to run both Win XP partition and OSX partition.

However I noticed that there is a slight slownees in the booting of both Win XP and OSX partition in the new 500GB hard disk as compared to the old 160GB hard disk. Maybe it is due to the bigger size of the new hard disk. *** EDITED: I also noticed that the clock in the McWindTosh becomes very slow. Playing movies in Quicktime is also slow. Searched the forums for solution. Found it. I installed the old Chameleon EFI. I am supposed to install the new Chameleon DFE for hard disk. I downloaded it, which is about 10MB and reinstall the DMG file. After that, there is a slight change in the Darwin bootloader. However everything goes back to normal. No more lagging clock. Movies in quicktime is also much faster.

Now I have a MSI McWindTosh with a megasize hard disk with working wifi, bluetooth, vga out, ethernet, sound, webcam and 3G (with Huawei USB modem). The VGA out to external monitor or LCD projector works only with extended desktop mode. The mirror display doesn't work unless you install the new GMA950 video driver. However with the new GMA950 driver, there will be a severe lagging and mouse trailing seen when you use any Microsoft Office products. So I decided to only use the extended desktop mode for the VGA out and not to install the new GMA950 driver.

Next project is to do an upgrade to Leopard 10.5.6, for me to use ILife 09. This is slightly more difficult since you have to use many Kernels and drivers. But for now Leopard 10.5.4 is good enough.