[G4] Re: Super Duper Cloning software

[Steve Goldstein]

Keith,

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

You are the first person to support my assertion that the firmware does not reside on the drive, but on the computer itself.  I think there is a special ROM chip (at least in the older Macs) on which it resides.  I can recall in the early days of the Mac when people removed the ROM chip to make the clones of the Macs, either as desktops or as laptops (anybody remember the Kangaroo?  I had one.).  But, I guess that somebody asserts that you need 9.x to do one of the firmware upgrades to the ROM.  That is entirely possible; I think I did that once to one of my older Macs, but it was so long ago that I forget the details.  One thing I seem to recall is that you need 9.x (9.2?) to be able to determine your firmware version before upgrading it. 

Bottom line: if your old drive is still working and you have 9.x on it, go ahead and do the firmware upgrade (to the computer's ROM -- Read Only Memory) before you do anything else.  Then, clone your old drive to the new one using CCC or SuperDuper (I downloaded it after reading these discussions, and it looks more straightforward to use than CCC, and it is free if all you use it for is cloning and not scheduled backups). 

--Steve


At 2:23 AM -0800 1/17/07, keith_w wrote:
>That means the firmware is already in the Mac's CPU somewhere, and it's THAT that is being upgraded, not the hard drive.
>You said, "Perform firmware upgrade on new drive." Just a point of clarification... It's not ON the new HD, it's USING the new drive.