Have I mentioned before that I love David Cohen. I love all the MyMac crew (and several offered helpful suggestions from which I learned a lot) but David is my current favourite. It was his suggestion that brought final success. To be fair, John Farr had also said that he used a clone and external HD for the data transfer, but he wasn’t completely sure what he did. David told me exactly what to do and allayed my fears at the same time.
ASIDE
My apologies to those who have been waiting with bated breath for the conclusion of this story. I was distracted during the week because a beloved cat had gone missing. Yesterday we found him, but he was, alas, dead. I’m in mourning (as are many of the people in our street, for this was a cat who let everyone know he loved them), but decided to get on with things because I know Paddington (the cat) wouldn’t want me to cry for the rest of my life.
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Using SuperDuper, as David suggested, I made a disk image from my G4 on the external HD, hooked the drive up to the iMac, then ran Migration Assistant. It immediately began doing its stuff. Took ages, but who’s complaining.
I’m still not sure why the Ethernet thing didn’t work, but it does seem likely that there’s some problem with the G4 or its ethernet connection. Maybe, too, it’s just too old or something, or Leopard doesn’t like transferring stuff from Tiger, or maybe the G4 was jealous of the iMac and was sulking.
Who knows. Those who don’t like unsolved mysteries might like to investigate further, but I want to move on.
SOME ISSUES
The transfer wasn’t as brilliant as I had hoped (this could be because I chose the wrong options or something, but I don’t think so). I find there were things I had to do ‘manually’, like importing iPhoto and iTunes libraries.
1. iPhoto While all the photos loaded successfully, there are LOTS of incorrect dates (in my experience, iPhoto often stuffs up the dates). It will take a huge amount of work to sort all that out. Also, iPhoto imported the images, but not the albums. Again, a lot of work to set them up again.
2. iTunes Didn’t import playlists or my purchased music.
3. Address Book Didn’t import ‘groups’
4. iCal Imported G4’s calendar but put all the entries in the ‘to do list’ section instead of in the calendar itself. I haven’t been able to work out what to do about this. The calendar worked as a great diary … I could look back to previous years and see what happened when. Don’t feel like entering several years’ events one by one.
If anyone can throw any light on all of this, or can offer some quick fixes I’d be delighted.
But at least I’m in a position now to resume work, and to move the extra Mac, monitor, keyboard and mouse off my desk. I’ve had a few narrow escapes when I pressed delete on the wrong keyboard!
In an ideal world, I’d just keep the G4 nearby in case there was something I’d overlooked. But my husband is taking it over, and needs it urgently. To make it usable I had to clear off most of the stuff.
All digits are crossed.
That’s all for now, but I daresay there will be more in weeks to come.
Over and out.
A virtual kiss to all those who helped me through the trauma
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