What is the best procedure to make a Backup, before I try different MultiBeast options? I dont mean to clone the whole hard drive.
The "best" procesure
is to clone the whole boot partition.
Perhaps I could save just the S/L/E files and some other files and after the Kernel Panic use the Terminal to copy them back in place?
What, all 488 MB of them? (an example from one of my machines) And sometimes it's which ones are NOT there vs which ones ARE there which will make it work/fail. And then it'll be something outside that folder (and /Extra, etc) that's the trigger.
Seriously, make a clone partition somewhere.
On my HTPC machine:
- 250 GB HDD: 60 GB boot partition, the rest unused (the 60 GB is at the fast end of the disk).
- 120 GB HDD: 60 GB clone partition
- (500 GB HDD: media files)
Copying the boot partition takes ~10 minutes, and that 120 GB disk is quite slow.
On my workstation:
- 120 GB SSD boot drive
- 750 GB HDD with a 120 GB clone partition at the end (the slow section)
- (lots of other drives)
The point of this example is that it doesn't have to be a whole drive, and doesn't have to be at the front of a drive (as long as it's within the first 1 TB).
You can use Super Duper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to do the clone. Mind you, it won't always get the Chameleon boot blocks right on the clone, but you can just re-run the Chimera installer (and select the clone partition as the Install Location) to fix that. Or you can boot off your UniBeast USB stick (you do still have it don't you?) and then select the partition you want even if it doesn't have the boot blocks.
There are times I've changed something, rebooted, not been able to get in, booted off the clone drive and found it was broken too, and then realised that other innocuous BIOS tweak I'd done might not have been a good idea. That's just one example, but if I had to change files around on the boot drive and worried I'd missed something when it still didn't work I would probably have lost the will to live somewhere along the path. I
highly recommend maintaining a boot clone!
And make sure you can reboot off the original successfully
before you copy it to the clone. Just in case you'd tweaked something bad and forgotten about it...
