Coupla Tiger questions...

J

jiclark

Registered
First off, does the Setup assistant work with secondary drives in the same computer, or only Target Disk Mode/Firewire drives? I have two drives in my G5, with data mirrored to both. I'd love to be able to do an "Erase and Install", then migrate my data from the other drive with Setup Assistant. Anyone know if this would work?

Secondly, I've read that a lot of Tiger's graphic stuff (CoreImage?) is dependent on a high-end video card. I have the stock 64MB Radeon card in my G5 (not sure of the model #, it's a rev. 2, dual-2GHz machine) and it's running two LCD monitors. Is this going to be an issue for me? Should I buy a better video card, and if so, which one is worth the money??? I've seen the fancy 256MB cards, but read that they're not really worth the $300-500 they might set me back...

Thanks for any input you can give! Woohoo, it's Tiger day!!
 
As for the "clean" install, I did pretty much what you want to do, but it was with an external FW drive. I don't know if it will work with internal (ATA), but I suspect it may. If you have the time, there wouldn't be any harm in trying it that way. If not, if you can borrow a FW case and put the mirror drive in it, you will be in business. Also, another option that seems to work fine or me in another machine, is the "archive and install" with the "import" checked. I had very little trouble on that system. Couple of things had to have serial number put back in, and the like, but mostly every thing imported OK.

I went from Panther to Tiger on my new 1.67gHz Powerbook 17". It is MUCH zippier. I don't know how much of that feeling is Core Image, tho. If you do much image or video work, it probably is worth getting a newer graphics card that will run Core Image, IMHO.

System Profiler will tell you which graphics card you have. Click on "Graphics/Displays" (System Profiler can be launched by going to "Apple Menu->About This Mac -> More Info...) It will tell you whether it's Core Image and/or Quartz Extreme compatible.

You should get something like this:
-------------------------------------------------------
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700:

Chipset Model: ATY,RV360M11
Type: Display
Bus: AGP
VRAM (Total): 128 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x4e50
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-xxxxx-145
Displays:
Display:
Type: Display
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1440 x 900
Depth: 32-bit Color
Core Image: Supported
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Supported
Display:
Status: No display connected

-------------------------------------------

According to Apple, these are the cards:

Core Image-capable graphics cards include:
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
ATI Radeon 9600 XT, 9800 XT, X800 XT
nVidia GeForce FX Go 5200
nVidia GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL, 6800 GT DDL

Hope this info helps.
-chuck
 
All G5 graphics cards are fine. Setup Assistant also works with non-FW drives (i.e. internal). It mentions "volumes on your computer", nothing about FW actually, IIRC.
 
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