Cloning and sandboxing old system drive on new machine

zeph

Hi,



my question is a fairly simple one if somewhat convoluted, but I'll try my best to word it clearly:



I just bought an '09 MacPro and stuck in 3 extra 1TB HDD's. I partitioned the 4th drive in two sections of 500GB each. On one of these partitions I want to clone the system drive of my old '07 iMac, the other partition will be used for Bootcamp.



I will use the iMac's HDD clone as an alternative boot disk, occasionally.



I suspect that there are some iffy things on my iMac, since power-down used to be near-instantaneous but now takes almost 20 seconds. That happened just overnight, BTW. Not a gradual process as a result of accumulating bloat, I think.



The one thing I want to avoid, is any sort of malware creeping into my new machine because I cloned my old system drive onto the new one. Is there any way in which I can "sandbox" the cloned boot disk and restrict that system from accessing/recognizing/affecting the other disks?



I basically want to run them as two entirely separate systems, even if they use the same CPU/RAM/GPU.



Any sort of input will be appreciated, thanks.



PS: what is that F8 thing again, where you use the other computer as a target drive?

karl kuehn

There is no "F-8" thing, but there is "Target Disk Mode" (hold down the T key while booting). And from there it is easy to use Disk Utility to copy the volume over. But there is not going to be any way of having the drive booted without it having full control. That said, the data is just data, and if you don't boot from that drive, no viruses (there are not any for MacOS X) can launch, and you would have to do silly things (like install from an untrusted installer) to get a trojan from it. There are far more likely candidates for why things slow down on an old computer (full drive, drive going bad, lots of things starting up, need more memory, printer daemon taking time to shut down, etc).