[robisconfusedd]

ok so i put a new 80gb hard drive in my laptop and hooked the old one into my external case and i installed tiger on the new hard drive freshly. (old hard drive has panther)

everything was working fine until i decided to use mac's "migration" utility to move the programs from my old mac to my new one.. man was that a bad idea, it froze halfway through and so i used forcequit because it obviously wasnt going anywhere anytime soon.. and so it didnt have any users, it trashed them all when it was getting ready to copy mine from my old hard drive..

anyway, i ended up restarting the computer later when i forgot about it, and now im stuck at the "mac os x" user startup screen, you know where you type in your username and password and log in, but both are blank and i dont have a username so it wont let me do anything... i tried putting the Tiger CD back in hoping it would boot to that so i could reformat and reinstall tiger.. but it wont even do that..

is there any way you can help me? im pretty much screwed that is my only mac..

thanks for any help!
rob

[PurpleGiant]

Did you try holding option when booting with the Tiger CD in? THis lets you choose your startup disk.

[analogika]

or holding the "c" key will make it boot from cd.

[Tsilou B.]

Just copy Panther from the external disk to the new one and then update it to Tiger. That way you will still have all your settings and applications without having to use a migration assistent. Follow these steps:

• Shut down the Mac.
• Turn on the external hard drive and connect it to your Mac.
• Boot the Mac while holding down the option key.
• When the menu with all bootable disks appears, select the external hard drive.
• Panther will start up and your Mac will work as it did before you switched the drives.
• Use Disk utility to initialize the internal drive. Use a name for the internal disk that's different from the name of the external disk so that you can identify both disks by name.
• Now download Carbon Copy Cloner and tell it to clone the Panther disk to the internal disk. This will take some time.
• When it's finished, shut down the Mac and disconnect the external drive.
• Now you can switch it on again and it will boot Panther from the internal disk with all your settings, applications etc. still there.
• Insert the Tiger DVD and update to Tiger.

That's it. I think this is the safest way - when you don't do it this way, you will have to use the assistent again to copy your files and maybe it will fail again.

[robisconfusedd]

Originally Posted by PurpleGiant

Did you try holding option when booting with the Tiger CD in? THis lets you choose your startup disk.

no i did not, this is exactly what i was looking for thank you very much!!! greatly appreciate it!