[royboy]

the original 15 gb hard drive on my wife's 600MHz iBook is getting quite noisy and I'm thinking it would be good to replace it before it goes down at an inopportune time. its running 10.3.9. so I have a Seagate 80 gb ready to install and have downloaded what look like very thorough instructions for the install.

just discovered that neither she nor I have record of her administrative password. oops. so I'm not able to do what I had planned, to clone her hard drive to an external firewire HD using CCC.

good news is that there's no software on the iBook that needs to be saved - just her documents, email, and it would be nice to perhaps retain settings/preferences. will I get all this if I just copy her user file over the the external drive and then copy it back? I used to understand all this back on OS9, but the OSX world with its invisible files remains kinda mysterious to me.

thanks - Roy

[Big Mac]

If you're going to go that route, open the Get Info window of the disk you're using to back up the files to and choose the Ignore Permissions option, and try to make sure you pick the same short user name when creating a new user after the clean install. You could also use an OS installation disc to change the admin password (found in the Installer menu of the OS X Installer).

[Cold Warrior]

Just boot from the OS X install/restore DVD and reset the password.

To copy items if you have another Mac, you can put the iBook in firewire target disk mode (does it have firewire?) and its current drive will mount like any removable media.

What email program does your wife use on that Mac?

[royboy]

OK, cool, password is reset. that was easy.

her iBook has firewire and she uses Eudora for email - which stores its mail files in her users/documents folder

so I'm gathering that it's easier to copy to my iMac using a firewire patch rather than to an external hard drive. would it generally be best to copy the entire hard drive or just the user file?

sorry for the low grade techiness on this one. I'm guessing this is a common question and I should be searching rather than asking it anew ...

Roy

[TETENAL]

You can boot from the system DVD and from the Utilities menu open Disk Utility. Then use the restore feature to copy the old to the new drive.

[King Bob On The Cob]

Drop the old drive in an external enclosure.

Install OS X on the new one, then plug in the external drive, and let Migration Assistant do it's thing.

If you forgot and already installed OSX and ran the setup utility, Migration Assistant is in /Applications/Utilities/