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Bountyman

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 24, 2003
1
0
Hey all,

Quick question that seems fairly simple but want to make sure it is safe. I'm upgrading from a G4 to G5 at my office, I don't feel like installing all my programs and such, burning stuff to CDs to transfer to my new Hard drive. Can I not just switch out the Hard drives and everything is good to go. The guy that is on the G5 is leaving so that is another reason i just want to switch drives. I dont feel like sorting through his stuff and trashing it and what not. Just seems like this would be easiest.

Is it as simple as just switching them out?
 

hex

macrumors newbie
Oct 24, 2003
5
0
no problem

yes you should be able to swap them easily, however I think the newer drives in the G5 are a bit quicker than whatever came in your G4. If you can just add your old drive and keep the one in the G5 too. then you can just reformat the original G5 drive when you have time.

-b
 

G5orbust

macrumors 65816
Jun 14, 2002
1,309
0
wow, what horrible technical advice. It will not work in the G5! The G5 uses serial ATA for hard drives, not the parallel ATA used in the G4 powermac.

You would have to find a parallel ATA PCI controller in order to use the hard drive.
 

Macpoops

macrumors 6502
Jan 15, 2002
433
0
PA
Or you could use the adapter made specificly for and SATA to ATA conversion. (they are backwards compatible) Unfortunately I do not know if the drive and adapter will fit into the G5 Case. Why not just set up the G4 in Target disk mode and transfer it that way. Holding down T while rebooting sounds like a hell of alot less work then swapping drives out to me.

Didn't the G5 ship with a specially built version of Jag? Would not having that version for the G5 not too boot?
 

Genie

macrumors 6502a
May 25, 2003
604
0
heaven
That's right- you can't use the PATA HD with the SATA connector, but you can hook up an ATA drive to the optical drive ATA cable (I did), or hook it up in a firewire enclosure, or use an Acard or other ATA raid adapter.

I did all of those moving my drives from the G4 to the G5 and they worked fine.

The system has to be changed to be the new G5 aware OS X.
 
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