[Tuishimi]

...I've owned more than my share of macs and I have never tried this. How well does it work and can I just use any old firewire cable between the two macs? Does it copy everything over, like license info for applications or just data type stuff?

I have always started with a clean slate and added what I needed most, reinstalling software, reentering codes, etc. Not sure if this truly belongs here as it is barely hardware-related. Does it work over USB as well?

[JKT]

Are you doing it from a PPC mac to an intel Mac? If so, I would be cautious about doing so as a number of reports have surfaced at MacFixIt.com of their being problems caused by this - primarily because of incompatible PPC only plug-ins and printer drivers etc being transferred.

However, any 6pin to 6pin Firewire cable will do - you connect the two together and re-boot the old Mac in Target Disk mode which means it mounts on the new Mac like an external FireWire drive. Then Migration Assistant moves things over. You can control what is copied to a limited extent and, if you pick everything, it copies most things over but any app that uses an activation scheme (e.g. Quark) will have problems and you may need to re-install some apps.

USB isn't supported for this and nor is an ethernet connection.

[Tuishimi]

Thanks. You scared me. I am just xferring stuff the old fashioned way. Grabbing data that I absolutely need via FTP.