SuperDuper! Tip

I’m going to have to send in my MacBook for service due to the random shutdown bug1. Luckily, I still have my old PowerBook to use while it’s in for service. Unluckily, I’d wiped it clean to get it ready to sell a while back so I need to set it up as a development machine again.

Initially I was going to try to copy over my MacBook set-up, but since it’s an Intel machine and the PowerBook is a G4, I decided the easiest way would probably be to set it up as a copy of my desktop machine2.

I picked up another external hard drive the other day because I had to send in one of my external backup drives in with the disks that are being recovered. I used SuperDuper! to create a backup of the MacBook (since the HD will likely be wiped when it is in for service) and of my desktop as .sparseimage files3 on the external drive. According to the SuperDuper! documentation, to restore from a .sparseimage file to a boot drive you can:

  • boot from the DVD that came with your Mac
  • launch Disk Utility
  • mount the .sparseimage
  • restore

This all looked promising until I got Disk Utility open and found no “open disk image” option in the File menu. This seems to be something added in Mac OS 10.4. So I booted from the DVD from my Mac mini4 and Bob’s my uncle.

So my very long-winded SuperDuper! tip: make sure you’re booting from a 10.4.x startup DVD or later in order to copy from a .sparseimage to your startup disk.

  1. Interestingly, I never had an issue with this until I installed the firmware update that was supposed to address heat issues. I didn’t have heat issues, so I didn’t install the firmware update for a long time, but was eventually forced to in order to install an OS update. I then installed the firmware update that was supposed to fix the random shutdown problem but it didn’t fix it. [back]
  2. After all, the desktop machine was once a copy of the PowerBook. [back]
  3. Auto-expanding disk images. [back]
  4. You can ignore the “You can’t install this software on this computer” message and just choose Disk Utility from the menu. [back]