Migrating user accounts w/o Firewire Target Disk
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.
mac os x
January 25th, 2008 03:18
I went for Intel Mac Pro. Everything is great, except now I have a bunch of users. The problem is, with the new IntelMac setup per factory it has a primary user, where the parallels and windows live. But to migrate my apps and docs from G5 the only way it will migrate is to create a new user in the IntelMac to match the users in the G5. This leaves me constantly having to switch users to use Parallels, and also causes big difficulties in getting files from Parallels to my user that has all my G5 stuff. I tried copying the Parallels folder into my G5 user account and it almost worked - but wouldn’t start Windows because “file was corrupted”. I suppose I could user Root User to transfer all my G5 stuff into the User that has the Parallels stuff, but then all the location links would be changed and I would likely spend months getting them all working right. I’m used to only having one user account for everything and this is a pain.