Replacing Boot Drive in a Power Mac

[Ranter]

I'm planning to replace the original 160gb SATA drive in my Power Mac with a larger 400gb drive. I have an external firewire backup drive I intend to use to facilitate this switch.

I expect to be able to boot my PowerMac from the external hard drive after using SuperDrive to duplicate the original drive, and installing the new, unformatted drive. I think I'm to hold down my C key as the Mac boots, yes?

Then I expect I can use the Apple Disk Utility to create a single large HFS+ partition, copy everything back to the new drive, boot from the new drive, and voila!

Could some kind experienced Mac user tell me if this sounds like a correct procedure?

Thanks, it's my first time replacing a boot drive in a Mac, so please be gentle.
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[greg]

You could use something like SuperDuper to copy an exact image of your current internal drive to your external. Then select the external as your boot drive from System Preferences > Startup Disk.
You can then boot off of your external. Once you have that working you can install your new internal and just reverse the process. SuperDuper will format the new drive prior to copying the image back.
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[Ranter]

Thanks Greg

That's pretty much what I did, except that I used the Apple Disk Utility to create the partition on the new drive before copying back from the external.

It's all done now, I'm running on the new drive. It seems that, just like everything else in OS X, that was soooo much easier than with that other well known OS.
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http://skeptichosting.com/

Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching