Transferring data from old, defect iBook to new?

K

Krank

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The screen on my old iBook quit. I got a replacement from insurance.

Now, the old one is full of material that I'd like to transfer (a year and a half's worth of music production; applications, files, documents, etc.).

What is the easiest way to do this?

When going thorugh the set up process with the new iBook, I was asked if I wanted to transfer data from an old Mac by FireWire; a process that involved i pressing 'T' on the old one while rebooting. I had no FW cable at hand, so chose to pass.

But would this allow me to transfer any contents of the old harddisk to the new, or just transfer personal settings/prefs?

Would it work even though the screen is out on the old iBook (which otherwise works fine)?

Advice would be very much appreciated - and thanks a lot in advance.
 
And I believe if you look in the Utilities folder of your new iBook, you will find a "Migration Assistant" (or some thing similar). This will transport everything including photos, music, documents, in addition to settings. It is likely the program you encountered when firing up the new iBook.

But as bobw mentioned, you need a firewire cable.
 
Oh, and depending on how much you have to transfer, it can take a while.
My 70GB total home folder took the entire night to transfer.
I don't know if this is normal or not, but when completed everything was transferred and put in the right place, to include network settings.

Pretty sweet, but it did take time.
 
Krank said:
The screen on my old iBook quit. I got a replacement from insurance.

Now, the old one is full of material that I'd like to transfer (a year and a half's worth of music production; applications, files, documents, etc.).

What is the easiest way to do this?

When going thorugh the set up process with the new iBook, I was asked if I wanted to transfer data from an old Mac by FireWire; a process that involved i pressing 'T' on the old one while rebooting. I had no FW cable at hand, so chose to pass.

But would this allow me to transfer any contents of the old harddisk to the new, or just transfer personal settings/prefs?

Would it work even though the screen is out on the old iBook (which otherwise works fine)?

Advice would be very much appreciated - and thanks a lot in advance.
Click to expand...

Easiest way is to use Super Duper
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

this supersedes most other Mac cloning software and can be used indefinitely in demo mode or you can pay a couple of dollars for it and eneable the Smart Update option which allows you to run it from an existing "blank" OSX installation and it will automatically update your new sytem to the saved state of the old one including all system settings and OS updates.

Then get an external FW drive and make sure you never get caught out by drive failure again by keeping a clone of your OS on the external drive regularly update using a scheduled Smart Update backup.

Super Duper costs less than a good firewire cable, BTW, but you need both.
 
octavedoctor said:
Easiest way is to use Super Duper
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

this supersedes most other Mac cloning software and can be used indefinitely in demo mode or you can pay a couple of dollars for it and eneable the Smart Update option which allows you to run it from an existing "blank" OSX installation and it will automatically update your new sytem to the saved state of the old one including all system settings and OS updates.

Then get an external FW drive and make sure you never get caught out by drive failure again by keeping a clone of your OS on the external drive regularly update using a scheduled Smart Update backup.

Super Duper costs less than a good firewire cable, BTW, but you need both.
Click to expand...

Sounds like really good advice - thanks a lot.
 
I got my new iMac and tried Migration Assistant. I was unable to restart the new iMac. I could log in and shut down. Went to the help line and they tried everything, and the fan started running full blast all the time. I am getting a new iMac today, but I think I will take the time to drag what I want off the old machine using target disk mode. If I use SuperDuper, how big of a HD will I need to back up everything? Does it bring everything over, or just files and preferences. My eMac HD is almost full (80gig). It shouldn't be this complicated.
 
1. Start up brand new Mac
2. Follow directions for transferring files from old Mac with FireWire cable
3. there is no step 3...
Not too complicated...
If you are upgrading from a PowerMac to an Intel Mac, you might run into driver incompatibilities (check for upgrades to download from the printer manufacturer's site, or delete the present printer and add using the included Tiger printer driver, which may work.) You may also have startup software from the OLD mac trying to start Classic, which can't work on an Intel system. You should be able to start in Safe Boot mode (Holding the shift key at start) and delete suspects from the startup software - in your System Preferences/Accounts pane, clicking on the Login Items. You can then select each item, and click the minus to delete. Which ones are safe to keep? Hard to know, and you could delete all as a test, then restart to check for a good fix.
 
baba said:
I got my new iMac and tried Migration Assistant. I was unable to restart the new iMac. I could log in and shut down. Went to the help line and they tried everything, and the fan started running full blast all the time. I am getting a new iMac today, but I think I will take the time to drag what I want off the old machine using target disk mode.
Click to expand...

You can't simply drag the data from one drive to another under OSX; certain files are owned by root and you won't have permission to move them.

You can do this if you log in as root but even then it will not create a bootable drive as the system folder will need to be "blessed"

If your new iMac is an Intel model then it is unlikely you will be able to clone the PPC version of OSX onto the new machine as the Intel Macs are using a radically different filesystem to the PPC models.


baba said:
If I use SuperDuper, how big of a HD will I need to back up everything? Does it bring everything over, or just files and preferences. My eMac HD is almost full (80gig). It shouldn't be this complicated.
Click to expand...

Super Duper makes a complete bootable clone of your OSX installation so you will need a hard drive at least the size of the one you are cloning.

It's not wise to use up all the space on your boot drive as OSX needs swap space to operate at peak efficiency; it's reckoned that OSX needs at least 25% free space on any startup disk. Less than this and you will notice a speed hit.

Hard drives aren't expensive these days; it's hard to justify not having at least one external as a backup.
 
A clone is no good if the machine's very different. I'd rather go with a clean install on the new Mac and drag over what I still need from the old one. Gives you a cleaner system, anyway. About some things being owned by root: Those are probably things installed by the system, anyway. It's mainly the data and prefs etc. that you need to move over. And those are _yours_, not root's.
 
Absolutely. You will still find that there are invisible files that won't copy by drag and drop even in the Home folder. Also, Applications lies outside the home folder as do many of the libraries and prefs files neded by those apps, so those PPC apps that have been optimised for Intel won't be copied. Non intel optimised apps will be no use anyway, of course.

I don't see why sudo ditto shouldn't work to copy from PPC to Intel Mac...
 
I'd re-install the apps, too. Again: For the "clean"-ness of the new setup. The single most important app (for you personally) won't work by simply copying over, anyway. It's a tradition, an old charter or something. As Robert Rankin would put it...
 
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