[X Newbies] upgrading

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Monday, Sep 15, 2003, at 03:56 Canada/Eastern, John Lowther wrote:

> i feel like i need to start over. from the beginning. but i don't know 
> where that is exactly.
>
> now that i have the firewire cable and know about target disc mode and 
> all that. can someone tell me how to safely  wipe the G3 of 
> *everything* and shift all the iMac stuff over to it.

In a nutshell, you can't. Not the way you've tried (it looks like 
you've just copied files in Finder, which will not work in OS X). Your 
problem is that the G3 can't start in FW target mode, only the iMac 
can. When you do that, the iMac functions like an external drive 
attached to the G3, and you can't duplicate the OS from the iMac on the 
G3.

There are several solutions you can try; but, since you insist on using 
FW, here's what I recommend:

(1) Re-install OS X on the G3 (I assume you're using some version of OS 
X 10.2). Boot your G3 from the OS X CD-ROM, and, prior to installing, 
partition the G3's drive in two volumes (neither partition should be 
less than 5 GB; at least one should be large enough to hold the data 
from the iMac). Install OS X on the smaller partition. Create user 
accounts with the same names and passwords as on the iMac.

(2) Hook up your two Macs and boot with the iMac in FW target mode.

(3) Use a dedicated utility (such as Carbon Copy Cloner, Retrospect, 
etc.) to duplicate the iMac's hard drive to the larger of the G3's two 
partitions. That's very important; trying to copy in Finder will not 
work correctly.

(4) Set your startup disk to the partition which is the duplicate of 
the iMac drive and reboot. Once you are sure everything works, you can 
delete the OS X software from the other partition, or, I'd suggest, 
keep it as an emergency boot partition.

f