Can I do this?

[t3rockhall]

My wife's old G4/867 is running 10.2.8 and is starting to act up.

Can I use my 10.3.9 G5 iMac's backup drive to erase the G4's drive and bring the old girl (the machine, not the wife) back up to speed, assuming the drive in the G4 is larger than the archive drive? How much extra space do I need? Once I move the files, I can delete many of them from her machine.

TIA

[dnanian]

You could copy them to an image stored on your drive, sure... but what does "act up" mean? A big move like this shouldn't be done without knowing it's going to make a difference...

[t3rockhall]

You could copy them to an image stored on your drive, sure... but what does "act up" mean? A big move like this shouldn't be done without knowing it's going to make a difference...

It's freezing while she's playing a favorite game of very recent vintage, when Eudora goes to check mail. Well, not freezing, the spinning pizza appears, eventually truns into an arrow, but doesn't function. I told her to quit Eudora before she plays her new Majonng game, but that's not right. It's also very, very slow to boot, but if I boot it from the LaCie backup drive (the G5 iMac's clone), it's nice and speedy. I suspect it's a problem with 10.2.8, which I have reinstalled and brought up to date.

I wasn't planning to make an image -- I was going to boot from the external and do an erase and copy. Mind you, except to save her Eudora stuff, most everything else can vanish. The Mac isn't used for much else than email and games, or if I want to run a program in Classic (which I haven't installed on my iMac, but could). The erase and copy would also update her Mac to 10.3.9, too.

I plan to upgrade all 3 of my Macs when 10.5 comes out.

I wanted to buy a new Mac Mini for myself, and give her the iMac, but she doesn't want to part with the 17" studio display!;)

[dnanian]

Maybe you should just upgrade it to Panther without doing a full erase?

[t3rockhall]

I don't think (OK, I'm not sure/I don't know if) the Panther DVDs that I got with my G5 iMac will install on the G4. Like I said, I plan to purchase 10.5 family pack and upgrade all three when it comes out, but it may be months away! It certainly wouldn't make sense to purchase Tiger at this point.

I think the G4 only has a 40 gig HD, and my iMac is using 35. There's also a TechTools partition on the G4, eating up even more space. May actually be too close to do what I intend. I COULD make a new bootable backup on the LaCie, remove all the extraneous files and free up space, and then write THAT in the G4. After completion, I could re-backup my G5 and get back to where I was.

All this thinking is keeping my 68 year old brain from getting Alzheimers.Maybe it's just time to bite the bullet and put the G4 to sleep...

[dnanian]

Perhaps an archive-and-install, then? It just seems that you don't know why it's freezing with this game, and are making some big assumptions...