Help needed from a Mac Nerd

[Barry Scott]

About 10 minutes ago my HD started making an occasional ticking sound it's never made before. Every time I remember this happening on other computers, it was right before I've lost a hard-disk. Because of this I have reason to believe my disk is gonna fall irreparably over and become corrupt in a few days.

This post is pure laziness. It's a Mac and I've never taken an image file (as i don't know what to use or how to do it - Disk Utility?) and want to buy a replacement drive just in case. I want to take an image of the whole drive, so when I buy my new one I can simply slip it on.

I also have another problem, as I don't have Leopard on disk, can someone point me the direction of how I can do all this without the OSX disk? Can I do what you can't do on Windows and simply copy the disk to a new one and job done?

Thanks and I can now confirm since starting this post it's definitely about to go. 

[pauld]

http://clonezilla.org/

Free Ghost-like thingy - burn the ISO to a CD boot disk, boot from that, then image away. And it sounds like the platters are fucked, so I'd shut the Mac down until you've backed it up, cos it's probably not far off failing completely and irrevocably

[Barry Scott]

Cheers Paul. It's just stopped ticking but a few minutes ago it was pretty repetitive and was causing momentary lockups in the mouse and typing as it ticked. It's on it's way and I haven't backed up for about 2 months - TWAT!

[jonny72]

Carbon Copy Cloner is another free option.

Though provided you've got a recent version of OS X, there is no reason to not use Time Machine. Just buy a decent sized external drive (at least twice the size of the drive being backed up), plug it in and let it get on with it. It's not a perfect backup solution but it's free and easy to use.

As Paul said, if you're worried shut it down and only turn it on again to perform the backup.

[pauld]

Seriously Barry, I'd work on the assumption that it will go west next time you start it up (it probably won't, but it could go any time) - shut it down, hie thee hence to a hard drive shop and back it up before you use it again. And take jonny's advice about the size

[Barry Scott]

Cheers lads. Has been off since my last post, as like you both said, leave it off until backing up. I went to pc world and bought a new drive. I've installed CCC and am sorting it all now. It went a bit crazy earlier with that old constant ticking again, and I thought it had failed. It's silent again now, but it's clearly going to go. hopefully not before I've cloned.

I think it's safe to say, once it's ok, it'll be backed up regularly!