Hi all, I just got a new 27"iMac i7 (Merry Xmas to me!) and The first question from she-who-must-be-obeyed was "why do you need a new one - the old one is only 2 years old - what are you going to do with it?!"
Peace and harmony was restored when I pointed out that the old windows machine that her Mum uses was so slow you kept thinking the thing had crashed and how nice it would be to pass on the nice shiny 24" iMac to her (coincidentally it would also be nice to have access to a nice Mac when we visit her in Perth - which we do fairly frequently). So far, so good. However the new machine obviously came with SL and not all my software is SL compatible, also after many successive migrations and system upgrades I decided it would be nice to set-up SL slowly from scratch with regard to applications and user data (rather than just migrate everything from the old machine to the new machine). I am also wanting to re-organise my document/data filing sustem as I intend to incorporate some form of cloud back-up/synchronisation using something like iDisk or Dropbox (or both) as both an extra layer of back-up redundancy and as a convenient way of keeping some data synched between my desktop & laptop computer. I thought I had come up with a good plan - since the new machine had a whopping 1TB HD, I would partition the HD in 3: - Partition 1 with a nice fresh SL installation. - Partition 2 with a clone of my current 24" iMac HD - Partition 3 (I just want my EyeTV recordings and video on an extra partition to suit my back-up regime) As I saw it, I could then pass the 24"iMac on to the mother-in-law (as everything was now on partition 2 of the 27" iMac) and slowly set-up the SL partition as I wanted it, whilst still being able to boot-up the 27" from partition 2 (running 10.5.8) and essentially have all my apps and settings just as they were on the 24" without any worry as to what was SL compliant. Now, many of the gurus out there will have already spotted the fatal flaw in my strategy - it appears that I can't actually boot up the new iMac in Leopard! - it seems to require SL! I have now passed on the bad news that I will need to hang onto the old machine for a while longer until I am happy that everything I need is SL compliant, or upgraded, or substituted - in general I do not foresee too much of a problem - I am happy with the move to SL and happy to upgrade programs such as Parallels & Reunion - my main bugbear will be MS Office where I have not upgraded from Office 2004 to Office 2008 because MS killed off VBA and I use quite a few macros. However, to get to the point (finally, I hear you say!) what I was wondering was how will everything go if I boot up in SL (partition 1) and attempt to run my old applications from their current location in the applications folder on partition 2 (the cloned Leopard folder) - this would only be an interim thing - as I confirmed that things ran OK under SL (with Rosetta if necessary) I would then install the apps in their correct location (the apps folder on partition 1). The idea would be that everything I wanted/needed would be gradually transferred from partition 2 to partition 1 (in the case of data/documents) or installed on partition 1 and then deleted from partition 2 (in the case of applications) and any old/obsolete stuff just deleted from partition 2. I would obviously set up the new SL installation with the same accounts as the old Leopard installation - to minimise any permissions problems with accessing the old user folders on partition 2 When everything is off partition 2 I would clean/erase it and use it as a second media partition. However, I am aware that OSX can be a bit picky with where you put certain things - so I was wondering if I was likely to run into any particular problems in the interim as I gradually move stuff of the old partition to the new one? -- Neil R. Houghton Albany, Western Australia Tel: +61 8 9841 6063 Email: n...@possumology.com -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
