Practically Bricked my G5

SargasoC

Registered
Dear all,

It’s official: I am a bonehead. I’ve really done it this time and am not sure where to begin to start to unravel the mess I’ve made for myself.

I am currently running Tiger on a G5. This G5 is connected to an Airport Extreme. I also have a WDS with Airport Express to stream music and a linksys router for Tivo. Connected to the network are one MacBook and MacBook .

Last year the G5 started to act a bit wonky. I used iBackup and an external firewire drive and backed up the hard drive. Additionally I bought a second internal hard drive (and installed it) in case the first one died. I tried to run Disk Utility, Onyx, and Disk Warrior on the original hard drive, but all reported hard drive errors that were not repairable. I decided to ride it out as long as I could, before reformatting the drive.

Now to the bonehead part: Yes, I backed up the drive with iBackup, but in the ensuing time, I purchased SuperDuper, so I decided to use that to back up the drive on Saturday, when I was having major trouble with Mail. I thought I had backed it up, but in reality, I only backed up the User Files. OK, so maybe I’ve lost some data between this back up and the iBackup of a year ago. I have a lot of smaller back-ups, say of music and photos and stuff for work—so I only have myself to blame, but I can live with it. I then erased the Mac HD drive and reinstalled Tiger (I wanted to put on Leopard, but the only disks I have are the system disks that came with the MacBook and MacBook Pro). My idea was that I could fire up the firewire and migrate the user files during the install process. Nope, I assume because there’s no OS on the firewire drive and I can’t startp in target mode. So what I got was a clean install with a new user name. Then I thought maybe I could restore the user files with SuperDuper and boot from them. Nope. It seems that the G5 doesn’t recognize these restored user files as other users, but merely as folders (with lots of really good stuff inside). Also I wrecked all my network settings and spent the better part of the afternoon getting back online (though I still cannot get my WDS up and running). I wanted to first restore the user files (which I did, but they’re not recognized) before I restored the iBackup files, which I did easily.

Here’s the question: how can I get the G5 to recognize those SuperDuper user files? If I buy stand alone Leopard (grrr), will Migration Assistant allow me to migrate the user files during the install of the OS? Or would the drive still need an OS to be recognized by Leopard install? It would be easy to reinstall now—since the G5 is a big brick currently. I have access to other firewire external drives if I need them.

Help!

Sargassoc :eek:
 
Actually, it was an easy one: I went to System Preference --> Add an Account. When I clicked on it, the backed-up user appeared! Duh. It never occurred to me that this would work (for a few days, until I was talking about it to someone).

So, actually, I am a bonehead, just not the kind who broke the computer; the stupid kind who doesn't consider the simple solutions first!
 
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