I appreciate what you are attempting to do but my past experience as well as the past experience of the vast majority on this and other forums would indicate your efforts, however well intentioned, are misguided. Do the recipients a favor. Scrub the hard drive, a single pass erase will be sufficient, then install the OS but do NOT set it up. From that point on it is their Mac and the new user can set it up and configure it the way they want to without being bothered by everything you have done or not done, right or wrong in its history. In the long run everyone will be a LOT happier.
I'm sorry I'm not being clear. They have a new iMac that they are using out of the box. I picked out a new 3 TB external drive. I would like to just copy everything from the internal drive on the old computer onto one partition of the new 3 TB drive so they can pick things off as they need them, like pictures, etc. Have that small partition mounted all the time, as well as the other partition that is their new TM drive.
So, as far as I understand, it is ok to use a partitioned drive for TM, I can use CCC to copy the internal drive on the old computer onto a small partition of the new external drive, and then they will be using the other partition of the new external drive for TM. The old TM drive that went with the old computer is going to hard drive heaven because it is already corrupt anyway. The drive on the old computer is then wiped, a new system installed, and it goes to the kiddies at home. Right?
