[macbain80]

I have a clamshell ibook 466, and am planning stepping up to 1ghz Ti soon. I don't want to go through all the hassle of reinstalling all my software, add-ons, etc. and it seems people swear by Carbon Copy Cloner to make working clones of their systems.

The question is, is there a downside to cloning a 10.2.4 system from an ibook to a powerbook? Isn't the installation of Jaguar and it's updates tailored toward the machine it's being put on? I.E. I know that the energy saver control panel on my ibook version lacks the "processor stepping" checkbox that the powerbook installation has. Is this endemic of other problems I would find? Do I need to bite the bullet and reinstall everything?

Thanks for any help...

[seanyepez]

I wouldn't recommend doing so. The most I'd do is drag and drop a user directory onto a new computer.

[Simon]

Originally posted by macbain80:
I have a clamshell ibook 466, and am planning stepping up to 1ghz Ti soon. I don't want to go through all the hassle of reinstalling all my software, add-ons, etc. and it seems people swear by Carbon Copy Cloner to make working clones of their systems.

The question is, is there a downside to cloning a 10.2.4 system from an ibook to a powerbook?

This is not at all a good idea. People have reported strange stuff happening after cloning between different hardware. Even though the iBook and the PowerBook are both portable Macs their boards are rather different. I'd doubt that the PowerBook would like the iBook's software prefs and extensions.

There is however a rather quick way to go from one machine to the other and I have used it many times with 100% success and almost no hassle.

1. Use CCC to backup.
2. Install a fresh Jaguar on the new Mac.
3. Make user accounts with the same names you used on the old Mac.
4. Log in as root on the new Mac, delete the user folders on the new Mac and copy the old user folders to the new Mac where they belong. Finally do a chown -R name:group on the copied user folders (there's an Apple Knowledge Base article on this step)
5. Copy back from your backup the apps and utilities installed at /Applications and /Applications/Utilities
6. Re-install only those apps that really require an installer, i.e. those that copy strange stuff to all kinds of special locations, like XDarwin or Fink.

That's it. Doesn't take very long, gives you a completely fresh and clean system and everything is like it used to be w/o you having to reset all the prefs. Actually I find it easier than under OS 9 where I had to manually go through the preference folder's hundreds of files by hand and decide which ones to take over to the new machine...

If you need additional explanations with those steps above just say so. HTH.

[macbain80]

Thank you so much, awesome help. I'll check out that KBase article. Thanks again.

[tfr]

Originally posted by seanyepez:
I wouldn't recommend doing so. The most I'd do is drag and drop a user directory onto a new computer.

I got my new PowerBook a couple of days before my new iMac. So I installed all the software on the PB and once the iMac arrived, thought that it would be a neat trick to copy over the Library directory to automatically get all my preferences transferred.

It didn't work at all for some apps (bbEdit for example), and Office, especially Entourage, acted real weird until I finally did a clean install on the whole machine. It has been stable since (whew).

[Simon]

Originally posted by macbain80:
Thank you so much, awesome help. I'll check out that KBase article. Thanks again.

No problem. If you need help finding that article just say so. I don't have it here, but I can dig it out of one of the piles of junk in my house.

[LosJackal]

Originally posted by seanyepez:
I wouldn't recommend doing so. The most I'd do is drag and drop a user directory onto a new computer.

I'm with you.

And for those of you indeed cloning, or not installing from the Software Restore, note that you get some free software on your computer, like OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner. Copy them off before you reformat.

[Simon]

Originally posted by LosJackal:
Copy them off before you reformat.

Or get them from the hidden folder on the restore DVD, like

% ls -al /Volumes/SystemRestore/.images/