Need to Re-format my internal drive...

[Tim White]

My apologies if all this has been covered before, but I just wanted a little confirmation on how to perform a disaster recovery before I do anything too stupid.

I need to re-format the internal hard drive in my macbook pro (intel C2D) to change its filesystem (its a long story). To now, I have been using a paid copy of SD to write backups to an external HD (firewire connected). The internal drive is called "Macintosh HD" and the external is called "Backup" (and Macintosh HD2, it's partitioned). I have tested booting from the external SD backup drive by holding "option" down at boot time, and all is good.

The steps I intend to be perform are as follows;

1. Rename external drive to "Macintosh HD" (same as internal drive - after reading some other threads on these forums).

2. Boot from External "Macintosh HD".

3. Use disk utility (residing on external "Macintosh HD" that I booted from) to reformat internal HD using default filesystem.

4. Restore from external Macintosh HD to internal Macintosh HD using restore functionality in disk utility.

I decided not to boot from DVD in case the version of disk utility on there is bad as per another thread. Can I really get away without booting from DVD? Is there anything else I need to be careful of? Any gotchyas or words of wisdom?