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torifile · Jan 26, 2003, 09:50 AM

I've decided to get one. It was just too appealing. Should I just do a clone of my current drive to the PB or reinstall? I've got a Ti right now, if that matters. Would there be system software problems if I do that? I'm running 10.2.3. TIA.

icruise · Jan 26, 2003, 10:09 AM

You could probably use a clone of your current drive fine (I am using a clone of my Pismo's drive on a firewire drive to run my wife's ibook right now with no problems), but I think it might not be a bad idea to use a fresh copy of the OS and just copy over your documents and apps. I plan to do that when my 12" comes...

OldManMac · Jan 26, 2003, 10:10 AM

Personally, I would just reinstall. I'd want to start off with everything fresh, not wondering if I were dragging any problems over. But, that's just me.

MrBenn · Jan 26, 2003, 10:42 AM

I plan to buy a 12"pb soon, my first laptop. As I understand it a Powerbook can be used as a firewire hardrive? ('firewire target disc mode, or something'?) My plan is to connect my new Powerbook to my iMac and copy over all my files. Anyone see any problems with this? Maybe this would work for you torifile?

icruise · Jan 26, 2003, 10:46 AM

I think that's probably what he was planning to do, but the question is whether you should clone your entire disk (using the program Carbon Copy Cloner) or if he should reinstall the OS and everything from scratch. There are probably advantages to each.

torifile · Jan 26, 2003, 10:47 AM

Originally posted by MrBenn:
I plan to buy a 12"pb soon, my first laptop. As I understand it a Powerbook can be used as a firewire hardrive? ('firewire target disc mode, or something'?) My plan is to connect my new Powerbook to my iMac and copy over all my files. Anyone see any problems with this? Maybe this would work for you torifile?

Firewire disk mode is a godsend. I love it and there should be absolutely no problems with just dragging files and preferences over. I've got a more unique case in that I do a lot of web dev. on my computer, so I have stuff in other places on my HD and just copying the files over would not leave my databases intact. I probably will just reinstall everything and copy my docs over. But reinstalling is always a pain. Oh well, it's a good pain, right?

icruise · Jan 26, 2003, 11:02 AM

By the way, I was thinking about this the other day, but is it possible to do this kind of thing on windows? I'm not sure about XP, but certainly with earlier versions of windows there was no way you could just copy a hard disk to another computer, or to a firewire disk, and expect to get a usable system. Seems like it is a big advantage of the Mac (admittedly it was even better in OS 9 when you could just copy things in the finder from one disk to another to make a usable copy of a disk, but it's still pretty good).

torifile · Jan 26, 2003, 11:22 AM

Originally posted by Icruise:
By the way, I was thinking about this the other day, but is it possible to do this kind of thing on windows? I'm not sure about XP, but certainly with earlier versions of windows there was no way you could just copy a hard disk to another computer, or to a firewire disk, and expect to get a usable system. Seems like it is a big advantage of the Mac (admittedly it was even better in OS 9 when you could just copy things in the finder from one disk to another to make a usable copy of a disk, but it's still pretty good).

AFAIK, there is no way to do this unless you use some type of program like Ghost and it's to an identically speced computer. Windows is heavily hardware dependent, meaning that drivers need to be installed for specific parts, so you're going to get a headache if they're too different. OS X is hardware independent, meaning all drivers are installed for all standard things and loaded as needed (as a dynlib, I believe). If you don't need a particular driver, it's never loaded and only takes a few k on the HD. Pretty neat, IMHO.

TheBum · Jan 27, 2003, 01:03 AM

Originally posted by torifile:
I've decided to get one. It was just too appealing. Should I just do a clone of my current drive to the PB or reinstall? I've got a Ti right now, if that matters. Would there be system software problems if I do that? I'm running 10.2.3. TIA.

Definitely reinstall. The version of Jaguar on the 12" is a later revision of 10.2.3 than is available for older machines, so it's quite possible the older 10.2.3 wouldn't have all the hardware support that the 12" PowerBook needs.

torifile · Jan 27, 2003, 01:12 AM

TheBum, that's what I ended up doing. It wasn't as painful as I thought it would be except that I got all the way out to my coffeeshop of choice ready to do work when I realized I forgot to install mysql.

Other than that, it's been painless. Just need to reinstall a few more things. And .mac synchronization made the process that much easier. That's got to be one of the most untouted features ever! I love it now.

kcmac · Jan 27, 2003, 01:52 AM

I always prefer target disk mode for apps and leave the system alone.

Do you think there is a chance that the superdrive PB's will start to ship with 10.2.4 soon? Maybe for iLife?