[geeks] Swapping hard drives in a G4

[Mark Benson]

On 6 Sep 2006, at 00:16, Brian Dunbar wrote:

> I've got two G4 Powerbooks.  They do not have the sam RAM or processor
> speed.  OS on the first is 10.4.6
>
> The LCD backlight on the first has crapped out.  Is it possible to
> simply plug the hard drive from the one with a broken LCD to the  
> healthy
>  laptop with a minimum of fuss and bother from the operating system?
>
> And yes I could simply move everything from one to the other.  But.
>
> I'm due for an new Mac from work Real Soon Now.  The less fuss and
> bother I have to get up and running for a few weeks the better.  The
> thing works it's just not very usable as a laptop and the lack of the
> LCD for a second screen on my desk is driving me bats.

This might be a bit late, and it's a bit radical but it'll work, I'm  
pretty sure...

Fire up the old laptop and let it boot attached to a monitor  
(whatever works with that G4 PB).

Fire the new laptop up in FireWire Target Disk mode.

Plug the FW cable from one to the other.

Wait for the new laptops disk to mount on the old one.

Make carefully sure you don't have any files on the new machine's  
hard drive that you need (I know this is a geeks list but... hey I'm  
used to 'Mac Users' :oP).

Format the new drive with whatever format you want, I recommend  
Macintosh HFS Journalled (NOT CASE SENSETIVE!).

Use a little util called 'Carbon Copy Cloner' on the old laptop and  
set it to copy everything from the old drive to the new drive.

Leave it and go make dinner.

When it's done you should have a complete copy of your existing  
Powerbook's disk on the new machine. You might have to boot the OS X  
install CD and set the startup disk, but it SHOULD pick it up  
automatically.

AFAIK OS X will boot on any machine of the same basic type.

I can't put a 100% guarantee on this working but at the end of the  
day as long as all your data is on the old powerbook you've got  
nothing to lose.

-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://mdblog.68kmac.org>
68kMac.org:
<http://www.68kmac.org>

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