[X4U] B&W G3 to Mac mini upgrade problem

[Joe Sporleder]

Yesterday I installed a Mac mini in a remote single person newspaper 
office as a replacement for an aging B&W G3. The Mac mini came with 
MacOS X 10.3.7 and the B&W G3 was running a slightly older version of 
Panther. I used Software update and brought both machines up to 10.3.9. 
I repaired disk permissions on both drives, then used Carbon Copy 
Cloner running on the B&W G3's internal drive, to clone its internal 
drive to an external Lacie FireWire drive. I then reversed the process 
and cloned the FireWire data to the Mac mini's internal drive. I've 
tried using both Carbon Copy Cloner & Disk Utility to do the cloning, 
but whatever I do, I can't get the Mac mini to fully start up from the 
internal drive. It hangs up during the startup process at either the 
network services or at the windows login services (at the tail end of 
the MacOS X startup progress bar).  However, the Mac mini runs 
perfectly fine started up from the external FireWire drive that I'm 
trying to copy from . . . in fact, all of our normal production 
applications, font manager, email, iCal, iChat and other preferences 
are there, running perfectly just as they were on the old B&W G3. The 
B&W G3 of course, is unable to boot from FireWire, could that have 
something to do with it? If worse comes to worse, I can reinstall all 
of my production apps from scratch, but if anyone has a simpler idea to 
try first, I would be interested in hearing it.

Joe