Use SD to migrate from G5 PPC to Intel MBP

[longkc]

Am I correct in thinking that I should not use SD at this time to migrate all of my data from a PPC G5 to a Intel MBP, both are running Tiger now. Is there specific OS software that is MBP specific that I would loose functionality?

I want to clone my desktop to my laptop, but don't want to mess up any MBP specific software.

Thanks for your suggestions.

[jonault]

I don't think you want to do that by cloning the disk from a PPC machine. When Tiger first came out, there were no Intel Macs yet, so it was not Universal. All Intel Macs shipped with a custom version of Tiger that would run on Intel Macs (with the exception of the new laptops introduced a couple weeks ago, which shipped with Leopard). Even if the version of Tiger on your PPC is up to date it may not be fully Universal, and even if it was it would probably not include some bit of customization required for the newer hardware.

You can see the same thing happening with the new MacBooks. I bought one last week, and already it has a different version of Leopard than the one sold in the store, even though they were only released a week apart. It's possible that's just to prevent folks from using the system restore disks to install Leopard on other machines, but when I tried to boot the MacBook with an up-to-date installation of Tiger (installed from another Intel Mac on an external drive), there were issues with the trackpad not working correctly. So even aside from the PPC vs Intel issue, there are potential problems in moving an older OS to a newer machine.

Your best bet is to use Migration Assistant to move your apps & user account info across to your MBP. I used it with my new MacBook and my old iBook G4, and it moved everything over just fine.

[dnanian]

As jonault says -- don't use SD! to do this. You should use the Migration Assistant and migrate either from the original Mac or from a full "Backup - all files".