I keep asking OS X questions here, but you guys know so much. Anyway, I am in the process of buying a new 12" PowerBook. I'm giving the iBook away to an old buddy.
I'm pretty happy with the setup I got on my iBook. What I'm looking for is a solution to migrate all my data, programs, preferences, etc to the new PowerBook. I also have an external FireWire drive to help me. Here's a scenario I thought about:
- Boot the iBook in FireWire drive mode from the PowerBook - create a gzipped tarball of my complete iBook hard drive - move that tarball to the FireWire drive - Boot the PowerBook in FireWire mode from the iBook - erase all contents of the PowerBook and unzip the tarball on the blank PowerBook hard drive
I've got no clue if that would work. How about the .Mac synchronization, can I use it for that purpose. Help much appreciated here!
-- junior
Re:Don't do that!
merlyn on 2003-02-06T00:03:19
Right, my last two hops from powerbook to powerbook have basically been:That last step eluded me until I figured out what was going on. Now I'm happy.
- Boot the new powerbook in firewire mode
- Plug it in to my old powerbook
- sudo psync -d /
/Volume/NewPowerbookName - Unmount the disk
- Reboot
- (Sometimes) if the new machine doesn't boot, the old kernel isn't compatible. Install OSX again on the new machine, preserving the previous system folder so you can drag junk around.
OK on the first step, but you're thinking too UNIX-y from there on out.Here's a scenario I thought about:
- Boot the iBook in FireWire drive mode from the PowerBook
- create a gzipped tarball of my complete iBook hard drive
- move that tarball to the FireWire drive
- Boot the PowerBook in FireWire mode from the iBook
- erase all contents of the PowerBook and unzip the tarball on the blank PowerBook hard drive
If I were switching my one-and-only Mac to another one-and-only Mac, I'd start with a fresh install of the OS on the AlBook; the factory install includes OS 9 and Classic mode. If you boot the AlBook off of the OS CDs, you can reformat the hard drive to not include OS 9 drivers. This will prevent OS 9 from being installed. You might be able to recover some disk space by not installing things that you'll probably never use, like help files localized for Thai.
Next (Step 2), Boot the iBook in FireWire drive mode, and create a disk image of you home directory using DiskCopy (New -> Image from Folder or Volume). Chances are that anything you'd want to preserve is either in $HOME,
From here (Step 3), you can mount the disk image of your old home directory and psync/copy whatever you want. (This is a good opportunity to reorgainze $HOME, if you want.) Not only do you have your old $HOME online, but you have a backup as well. I'm assuming that the AlBook will have enough disk space for your disk images as well as what you copy off of them. If not, back it up onto a FireWire drive or something.
Finally (Step 4), just reformat and reinstall the OS on the iBook when you're confident you have everything backed up or otherwise accounted for. Oh, and be kind and try to bring it up-to-date with softwareupdate first.
