Spent a bit of time upgrading an Intel MacBook Pro from OS X 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

We wanted to do a clean install and in order to not forget about anything we wanted to create a bootable backup of the entire internal HD onto a 2.5” external HD.

We formated the external HD to HFS+ (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)) (Partitioning Schema set to GUID) and tried 2 free cloning-tools: Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! – Both produced backups that did not show up in the boot menu (the one you get to when you press ALT while booting). (It did show up as bootable on the iMac with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) though for some reason, but that wasn’t good enough)

So this is what did work in the end:

We connected the MacBook Pro to the iMac with a Firewire cable and booted the MacBook into Firewire Target Mode (press T while booting until the Firewire Logo shows up on the screen), which allowed the iMac to use the MacBook like an external HD. Then we used Carbon Copy Cloner on the iMac to create a full backup from the MacBook HD to the external HD (connected to the iMac of course) – The result was bootable on the MacBook Pro!

The actual upgrade was easy then. Insert DVD, start Installation, right after it reboots open the Disk Utility from the menu on the top, format the internal HD and install…