Perhaps this is an edge case, but recently I wanted to migrate my wife’s account from a G4 Yikes (1st generation G4 desktop machine) to a MacBook. It turns out that the G4 Yikes (aka, non-AGP graphics G4) is the only G4 (or, I believe G3) with built-in Firewire that won’t go into target disk mode.

You can, however, use the Migration Assistant with a mounted volume — if you happen to be able to yank the drive from the old machine and pop it in the new one, you’re good to go. I couldn’t, but had an external Firewire/USB drive. I used SuperDuper! to make a backup of the G4 HD, copied that to the external drive and then migrated from that onto the MacBook.

It worked great, but beware: you have to register SuperDuper! to get the full copy capability. I had registered, but was using a demo copy on the G4 and kept getting only the Users folder copied (which isn’t enough to Migrate from). With the registered version it will actually make a bootable volume.

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