Moving HD from G5 1.6 to either G5 Quad or Mac Pro

docdvm said:

When upgrading my G5 I simply backed up the old drive to the neww 500 gig drive in bay 2 and then switched them. Could I just switch it to a Quad and the voila! it works? Could it be that simple or will I need to reinstall all the software?

What about installing the drive into a Macpro? Could I just place it in a bay and then run all my programs, like Photoshop, Imageprint, and Office?

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If you're going from a G5 to a Mac Pro then you'll definitely want to reinstall everything. The Intel machines use a different boot partitioning and the Tiger install you buy in shops or that came on iMac G5s does not have the Intel stuff.

The easiest and best bet would be to use firewire and target disk mode. Plug in a firewire cable to the iMac G5 and the new machine and hold "T" on the G5 as you turn it on. It should then start up in target disk mode and appear as an external firewire hard drive on the new Mac.

You should be able to put the drive from the G5 into one of the extra drive bays of the Quad or the Mac Pro. I don't know if you could even boot the Quad from this disk. In the Mac Pro booting certainly won't work due to the PPC operating system and the different partition schemes.

Regardless of connecting it internally or via firewire, you can at least copy some of your Applications from the old disk to the new one by moving them in the finder. However that might not work for all of them, because some tend to install files in other locations as well. Depending on how essential those are they won't work on the new machine and need to be reinstalled. I guess Office might work, for the Adobe apps I am not so sure. In addition there might arise a problem with the product activation of the Adobe apps. I would definitly deactivate them before removing the disk from the old G5 and reactivate them after the installation on the new machine.