[Fellow2000]

At work I have to move from a G5 to a G3. The G5 is another department's and they need it back. I was lucky to find an old G3 lying around that I will be able to use although I know nothing about it.

I have an external firewire HD at my disposal, so I was going to use a utility called Carbon Copy Cloner and clone the HD in the G5. There is an option on there to make it a bootable drive. So, assuming that the powermac G3 has firewire, is it possible to clone the drive, plug it into the g3 and boot from it there? I know the g3 is going to have a smaller HD, so if I couldn't use firewire, can I plug the drive inside the computer, through IDE and boot from it that way?

I am basically just trying to move from one computer to the next without any hicups. Am I tackling it the best way? Is there better software that I should be using? I know this would never fly with windows, but the way the OS works and everything I can't see why this wouldn't work.

Thanks for all your help.

[JKT]

I assume you are using OS X as you're talking about CCC. If so, the answer is provisionally yes, you should be able to plug-in the external FW to the G3 and boot from it. However, that depends on what type of G3 you are talking about as not all of them are supported by OS X. Is it a beige or a B&W G3, or iBook/iMac? The beige G3's are definitely not (officially) supported and will not function with OS X. IIRC the B&Ws and the iMacs should all work with the possible exception of the very first iteration of the B&Ws and (FireWire) iBooks - I think there was something odd about the way FireWire was implemented on those models but I'm not 100% certain - only one way to know for sure I guess. FWIW, I ran a 400MHz Blueberry iMac DV from an external FW hard booting OS X from 10.0.x and upwards for the past two years or so with no problems whatsoever.

Also, inserting the drive from the external as an internal (assuming it is IDE/ATA) should also work I believe, but you may have to alter the master/slave settings for it to be bootable.

Edit - It might also be wise to make sure you have a blessed (bootable) OS 9 system folder on the same drive just in case you can't get OS X to boot.

[Fellow2000]

Originally posted by JKT:
I assume you are using OS X as you're talking about CCC. If so, the answer is provisionally yes, you should be able to plug-in the external FW to the G3 and boot from it. However, that depends on what type of G3 you are talking about as not all of them are supported by OS X. Is it a beige or a B&W G3, or iBook/iMac? The beige G3's are definitely not (officially) supported and will not function with OS X. IIRC the B&Ws and the iMacs should all work with the possible exception of the very first iteration of the B&Ws and (FireWire) iBooks - I think there was something odd about the way FireWire was implemented on those models but I'm not 100% certain - only one way to know for sure I guess. FWIW, I ran a 400MHz Blueberry iMac DV from an external FW hard booting OS X from 10.0.x and upwards for the past two years or so with no problems whatsoever.

Also, inserting the drive from the external as an internal (assuming it is IDE/ATA) should also work I believe, but you may have to alter the master/slave settings for it to be bootable.

Edit - It might also be wise to make sure you have a blessed (bootable) OS 9 system folder on the same drive just in case you can't get OS X to boot.

Excellent. Thank you so much for your answer. How would I go about getting OS 9 on my HD?

[JKT]

Originally posted by Fellow2000:
Excellent. Thank you so much for your answer. How would I go about getting OS 9 on my HD?

Good question! If you are cloning the G5 drive I wonder if the Classic install on that would work (you can't boot the G5 from OS 9 but that is due to hardware issues, not software ones)? If not, then the G3 itself might have a bootable OS 9 install on it which (if you are leaving that HD alone) should be enough to rescue any situations that may arise with the external.