Moving from an older machine to a new one is a scenario that probably fills many Mac users hearts with dread. Not that it’s that difficult to do, just that when you consider all the stuff you accumulate on your Mac, the processes, the applications, the tweaks and the adjustments, it doesn’t seem possible that you could fairly seamless and easily move all that to a new machine and get it up and running in a short amount of time.
Migration Assistant makes it just that easy. Of course, it helps to have a knowledgeable person around so the you get over the humps easily, but all-in-all, it’s one of the things that makes OS X so great.
I assisted a client recently move from a dual-core tower G4 to a almost new video production machine moving into a new role, a Mac Pro with two 3.0GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors. A screamingly fast system by any account.
The older mac had an e-SATA card in a PCI slot used to drive a SATA drive, which was also the boot drive. Also installed was a high-end PCI audio card.
The Migration Assistant lives in the Utilities folder in Applications. It’s basic operation is to access a mounted volume, copy the information off it and into the new machine’s operating system. Sounds easy, right? The first step in this is to get the older machine’s boot volume mounted on the desktop of the new machine so Migration Assistant could access it.
Macintosh systems have this neat trick called ‘target mode.’ Hold down the ‘T’ key, reboot, and a Firewire icon begins dancing around on the monitor. Target mode puts the computer into a mode that is basically like a big external firewire drive. Plug the target mode machine’s firewire port into another Mac and its drives pop up on the desktop. Voila!
Here we entered our first bump in the journey. The older tower G4′s boot drive was running on an e-SATA card. Target mode didn’t recognize the e-SATA card’s volume, so that scenario hit the rocky reefs of reality in short order.
Lo, there was a workaround. The client had a recent backup, a full duplicate of the boot drive, that we could plug into the new machine’s firewire port. Volume on desktop, and back to Migration Assistant.
Without giving away a lot of the process, let’s just say it’s fairly user friendly. You select the volume to transfer from and you are presented with the users on the volume. You select the one you want to transfer and all the applications, and user login data (everything in the home directory) is moved to the new machine.
Once completed, you have a user login on the new machine identical to the user login on the old machine with all the data and settings transferred. It’s fairly a miracle of modern technology yet is really only possible on Apple’s platform since they control both the OS and the hardware.
There were still some tweaks remaining to get fixed. The audio card was PCI. The new machine’s PCI Express slots are totally incompatible. The firewire scanner was unhappy with the Epson software, so Image Capture was called into action, a great program that most people don’t know exists on their Macs for working with scanners or digital cameras.
Tweak, adjust, get back to work. Total time: 3 hours for the copy, 2 hours getting things fixed, back in business.
