Re: Transferring information from PowerBook G4 to MacBook Pro?

JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

David Empson wrote:

Doing it via Firewire will be faster than Ethernet (and especially
Airport).

If your PPC machine is slow enough, it won't make a difference. In the
case of my G3, it got saturated at 100% CPU well before it reached even
half of 100mbps that ethernet is able to do. If it had been Firewire,
it wouldn't have made a difference since the bottleneck was the old
450mhz CPU. Obviously, if the CPU is younger/faster, the problem may not
be so visible.

It makes a big difference. Using Migration Assistant via Ethernet
requires the source computer be booted into Mac OS X, and the Migration
Assistant application acts as a file server.

Using Firewire target mode has no operating system at all. It is handled
by the firmware giving direct access to the hard drive (emulating a
Firewire storage device).

In my experience, Firewire target mode is in the order of twice as fast
as the numbers you mention above, even on a slow Mac.

Copying applications manually is a pain, and will waste a lot more of
your time.

Not really because in any event, you need to do an inventory of the apps
you have (SYSTEM profiler helps) and find out which ones need to be
downloaded again to get the intel version, or if you have some classic
apps that absoutely won't run on the new intel machine.

PowerPC apps generally run fine on Intel Macs. They can be updated at
your convenience to Universal ones which perform better. (Plugins can be
a problem - you can't run PowerPC plugins in an Intel application.)

More of an issue is older versions of applications which are not
compatible with Leopard. It is a good idea to make sure you have the
latest version of everything first, or at least be aware of likely
issues.

Classic applications will be copied by Migration Assistant but won't
work on Leopard, which makes it pretty obvious which ones you need to
deal with.

In any case, I was talking about finding all the miscellaneous bits and
pieces which are scattered around, and dealing with the fact that
manually copying will sometimes result in files with the wrong ownership
or permissions, so they don't work properly (or don't work for multiple
users).

The average Mac user will not be able to successfully copy applications
(with all support files) and system-level settings manually via Finder,

That is perhaps the case, but OS-X is much better than Classic for that
because apps are much more self contained in the ".APP" directory
structure without "extensions" in different folders.

Ever looked in /Library/Application Support?

Or the rest of the folders in /Library for that matter?

Mine has a lot of pieces of many applications, including fonts installed
by some of them (mixed in with standard fonts), which you would probably
miss if you tried to copy everything manually. If you leave those files
behind, applications will be missing part of their functionality or
won't work at all.

What is in library are usually preferences and they are generally in your
home login (and that gets copied when you copy your whole user hiearchy
over to the new mac).

Copying your home folder over by hand is at least reasonably easy.

Miugration Assustant takes care of these sorts of issues.

Well, in my case, it didn't work. And in fact, at the Apple Store, they
told me they didn't think it would work between PPC-Tiger and
Intel-Leopard.

It only has problems in rare cases, such as yours. You would probably
have had the same problems trying to upgrade to Leoaprd on the same
computer.

As everyone else is saying, migration from PPC to Intel and/or Tiger (or
earlier) to Leopard generally works fine.

But the software itself seemed happy and gave me no indication of a
problem. It wasn't until I tried to reboot that I saw problems.

That was because you had something installed in the System domain which
wasn't compatible with Leopard, or you had changed the system
configuration in a non-standard manner, which wasn't compatible with
Leopard, or which conflicted with assumptions made by Migration
Assistant when doing the conversion.

--
David Empson
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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