I found the time today to install my new iMac: 17" 1.25GH, 160Gb HD, 768Mb DDR RAM, etc, etc,
BUT. After taking all morning to sort out my old iMac to sell it on, linking the new magic machine, with its Imax-like screen, was a doddle. Or was it?
I'd planned to boot in 'Target Disk' mode to link to my two FW drives to begin the process of cloning the old startup volume onto the internal drive so that all my settings are transferred onto the new drive. The list of available drives didn't include the one I was looking for - only the internal drive and and a partition on one of the FW's (which is a not quite up-to-date clone of the disk I want to copy) showed up???
I continued booting onto the new drive just to see if all of my FW partitions(6) showed on the desktop. I created an identical account as on my unavailable drive. Having set things up, all the partitions were there on the desktop. I used Startup Disk to select the partition I wanted and chose Restart.
The bootup sequence ran but the dreaded ? appeared fleetingly before the machine booted to its internal drive. I restarted again in 'Target' mode and selected the other, cloned FW drive, as startup. All went well and I was booted into the drive which is a few days out of Sync with the old bootup partition that won't startup my new machine. These two are on different external drives (is that significant?).
I don't want to partition and clone to the new drive until I'm certain that I'm not going to render it unusable as a startup volume. What should I do? What might be stopping startup on the desired FW drive?
Sorry this post is so long and complicated, but I thought 'more info rather than less'!!
Thanks in advance.
Peter
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