How to switch from one drive to another

[prairiedream]

Hello! I have a Mac G5 with an internal 250GB hard drive and an external FW 320GB hard drive. I've been backing up my internal drive to the FW drive and it works great so far.

I just purchased and installed a new 500GB internal drive. I would like to transfer everything from the smaller drive to this new, bigger drive, and make that the main startup drive. How do I go about doing that? Do I just tell SD to "backup from" the old internal drive to the new internal drive? And then tell system preferences that I want the bigger drive to be the startup drive?

I want to make sure I do it correctly! Thanks for your help...

[dnanian]

That's all you should have to do: it's basically a restore. Make sure the new drive is properly formatted/partitioned for your Mac type!

[prairiedream]

Do you mean that since I'm using a Mac I need to make sure that it's to be read by a Mac, not by Windows? It's kind of confusing to me.

[dnanian]

Yes, it needs to be Mac-partitioned, and the partition scheme (the "Options" button in the Partition tab) needs to be correct for your CPU type (Intel/Power PC).

[prairiedream]

Thanks for the help! I copied the old drive over to the new one this morning and it booted up just fine! I'm still going to keep everything on the old drive for a week or so just to make sure everything's running smoothly.

[dnanian]

Terrific, prariedream. Easier than expected, eh?