[jmiddel]

Just got 17” PB, G4, 1.66. Need to have it be a clone of my desktop (DT), a G5 running 10.3.9. Using both SuperDuper and CCC, as I have done without ay problem for the last six years, with an iBook and an almost three year old 15”AL PB, I have cloned the DT HD to the 17” PB, and, at restart, the PB hangs at different stages of the boot, from blue death screen to starting printing or internet services. The furthest I have gotten is half a desktop, with dock, frozen mouse dead clock and no icons. I have done the following:

Run fsck, permissions repair, clear caches, reset pram, booted in safe mode, booted in open firmware and reset nv-ram etc (this is actually how I got to the frozen desktop), used DiskWarrior on both the PB disk, and then on the disk from which I was cloning, before trying again.

To test the PB I re-installed Tiger, and all was well. So this is not a hardware problem. To make sure that my software was not corrupted, I cloned the desktop to the 15” PB. All is well there also. Please do not tell me to install Tiger unless there is a compelling reason.

So what I don’t get, is why the same desktop HD can successfully clone itself to the 15” model PB and not to the 17” one. Same processor type, speed bumped from 1.33 to 1.66, a minor increment.

Thank you for any info you can offer

[Art Vandelay]

It requires Tiger to boot. In fact, I'm almost positive it requires at least 10.4.2 to boot.

[jmiddel]

So what is the difference between the two PBs that would make one only able to boot in Tiger?

[Art Vandelay]

It could be any number of differences. The newer 17" PowerBook requires drivers that just aren't provided by Panther or even 10.4.0. Generally, a Mac requires the version of the OS to be equal to or greater than what it shipped with. That model shipped with Tiger.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by jmiddel 

So what is the difference between the two PBs that would make one only able to boot in Tiger?

If it's the original PB G4 1.67GHz (January 2005), it requires 10.3.7. If it's the last release with the double layer superdrive (October 2005), it requires 10.4.2.

Mactracker is a great little app that's really handy for obtaining such information.

[jmiddel]

Thank you Art for the information, it always helps to know why things don't work as expected. Big Mac, the Mactracker app is great, what a database! Thank you!

I suppose I will have to upgrade to Tiger, which I am loath to do when I read all the problems on the MacFixit site.

[JKT]

Originally Posted by jmiddel 

I suppose I will have to upgrade to Tiger, which I am loath to do when I read all the problems on the MacFixit site.

...which the majority of people never experience. Don't forget that MFI, by its very nature, attracts people who suffer problems and does not reflect the number of people that actually do. FWIW, there were just (roughly speaking) as many problems reported for each of the 10.3.x, 10.2.x, 10.1.x and 10.0.x updates at MFI as there have been for each 10.4.x update.

[OreoCookie]

The 17" PowerBook should come with a Tiger CD. You shouldn't clone the drives, but use Migration Assistant instead to transfer all your applications, your data and your settings to your new machine.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by jmiddel 

I suppose I will have to upgrade to Tiger, which I am loath to do when I read all the problems on the MacFixit site.

I didn't see that your desktop is a G5. Wow, you are a late adopter. You've been missing out: 10.4 is worthwhile upgrade, and there's no reason not to upgrade based on your hardware. The people who have problems with OS X upgrades either have a lot of specialized software, haxies or underlying hardware problems. I have never had a single problem with any OS X upgrade since 10.0. At this point, however, you may be better served jumping to 10.5 instead.