[cornetet]

I just bought my FIRST Mac...after years of PC'ing. I bought a PowerMac G4 Dual 500MHz off ebay. It has 10.3.7 loaded on it.

My PowerMac has two harddrives: one is a 6GB drive (which has the Mac OS 10.3.7 loaded on it)....the second drive is a 82GB.

1) CAN I TRANSFER ALL THE MAC OS FILES FROM THE 6GB TO THE 82GB AND STILL HAVE A WORKING MAC OS?????

(I'd prefer just having all the files on the 82GB drive and REMOVE the 6GB all together.)

2) IF I CAN DO THIS TRANSFER...HOW DO I DO THIS????

I'm BRANDNEW to Macs so you really really need to spell it out for me (almost step-by-step) or hyperlink a step-by-step guide.

[Lateralus]

Easiest way to do it is with an application called Carbon Copy Cloner. You can get it from MacUpdate as I recall. The app is pretty straight forward. Once the copying is done, boot up from the 82GB drive and run a Permissions Repair from Disk Utility in the Utilities folder and you should be good to go.

I'm sending this to the Applications forum, also.

[reader50]

I'm assuming the 82 GB drive is currently empty. If it has stuff on it, you'd better say so. The following instructions assume the bigger drive is empty.

There are a few ways to do what you want. If you have the OS install CDs, the simplest way is to install fresh on the 82 GB drive. Insert the first CD into the drive, and hold down the 'C' key when you turn the Mac on. Follow the installation instructions to install into the bigger drive. When you first boot into the new install, it will offer to find and import all your data and applications from the old hard drive.

If you don't have install CDs, you can buy them from Other World Computing. Or get Tiger from various places - the cheapest price that I know of is the Apple Store for Education, which you qualify for if you're in school.

If you don't have install CDs and don't want to wait to get them:

1. You should be logged in as an Admin or root user before doing this. A regular user won't have permission to copy many of the important system files. Go to the Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Accounts. Your current user will be highlighted, and it will say if you are allowed to administer this computer. If not, then you need to switch to an account that has that permission. Or create a new account that has admin permissions. Or check the checkbox to give your current account admin permissions - it will ask for an admin password if you try to do that. If you don't have admin access and no accounts you can reach have admin access, then you need a Mac OSX install CD in order to reset the admin password. See above, and ignore the rest of these instructions.
2. Launch Disk Utility, it is located in /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. Select the 82 GB drive in the left-hand pane. Go to the Erase tab, set the volume format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in the Format popup menu. Erase the drive. This step will give you a clean drive to clone onto. Quit Disk Utility.
3. Go here and download SuperDuper. It's a cloner utility that can copy one bootable drive to another. There are other ones available, such as CarbonCopyCloner. But SuperDuper is the only one that is really free for what you want to do - CCC is $5 shareware. SuperDuper is $20 shareware, but only if you want it's more sophisticated backup options. It's free for basic drive cloning.
4. Use SuperDuper to clone the 6 GB drive to the 82 GB drive. This might take awhile.
5. Once it's done, quit SuperDuper and launch Disk Utility again. Select the newly cloned 82 GB drive in the left hand pane. Click the First Aid tab if it isn't selected already. Click the button to "Repair Disk Permissions". This fixes all the file/folder permissions on the new drive, which can sometimes be messed up. Messed up permissions can cause all kinds of errors when you try to boot into a drive. If Disk Utility finds a lot of permissions to repair, it can take a while to finish.
6. Go to the Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Startup Disk. Select the newly cloned drive to boot into, and click the Restart button.
7. If you boot into the new drive, good. Make sure everything is present, and that everything works. If it didn't work, then it's probably best to get OSX install CDs before you get into trouble editing your system.
8. Assuming everything seems to work, leave the 6 GB drive in for awhile and use the system. If it's still ok a week later, remove the 6 GB and put it in a safe place. Until you get your install CDs, that 6 GB drive is your only backup. For both your files and your operating system.

[wataru]

PLEASE DO NOT TYPE IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE IT IS VERY ANNOYING.


This text exists to trick the lame anti-caps filter.