Saga of the Mac Pro Upgrade

So I had bought these 2 1TB hard drives a couple of weeks ago and my intention was to replace the system drive and the secondary drive which came with the machine and were now filling up.

Easy job I though my plan was as follows:

Backup the system drive (Macintosh HD) with SuperDuper making it a bootable drive in the process.

I backed up to a partition on a USB connected 1TB hard drive. I had already backed up Martina’s Mac Mini to a partition on the same drive.

So I now had 2 partitions on the USB drive called Martinas Backup and Pauls Backup.

I then removed the old 500GB drives and replaced then with the new 1TB drives, a fairly simple operation on the Mac Pro.

I wanted a fresh install of OS  X 10.5.6 so I booted the Mac Pro using the Leopard disk and installed the OS. Once the initial setup completed I created an Admin account and logged in. I then ran the Software Update tool and downloaded all the patches and updates bringing the 10.5.0 install up to date with 10.5.6.

The next step was to migrate my user account and settings with all the apps from my backup. So I started Migration Assistant and clicked through the setup and got to the “select a disk” question but only Martinas Backup was listed. I tried everything from powering off the drive, to restarting Migration Assistant to rebooting the Mac Pro but to no avail. No matter what I did, only Martinas Backup would appear in the drive list.

Then I thought, ok, I now have the original system disk available and I have a SATA<->USB adapter that I can use to connect the drive externally. Again, despite the drive appearing in OS X, Migration Assistant refused to see it.

Then I thought maybe it doesn’t like USB (I’m starting to clutch at straws now) so I found a Firewire 800 external hard drive and removed the drive from the case, replacing it  with the one I had removed from the Mac Pro. Migration Assistant still didn’t see it.

I then got my Macbook Pro and booted it from the Pauls Backup USB drive. I then ran Migration Assistant and selected the Migrate To option. Then on the Mac Pro I started Migration Assistant and selected the Migrate From another computer. After entering a code number and waiting a while the migration started. Initially it said it would take 22 hours to complete. In reality it took 14 hours.

What a palaver Macs are supposed to be easy right? Not always.

Comments

[adijuh.com]

An interesting approach, I'll try too

[Jonathan Gardner]

Dude, I'm sorry you had to go through that. Something I learned a long time ago in the Corps. 'Even the best made plans don't survive first contact with the enemy.' Let me know if there is anything I can do to help in the future.

[Don]

Sounds like fun!

Have to say, I had the opposite experience when doing pretty much the same thing a couple of weeks ago.

I know it doesn't help :-)

At least it's done now!