easiest way to transfer files?

I'll get the ball rolling here. I think this is what you want to do:

1. On the PowerBook, create a new user, so you'll have a fresh new home folder.

2. Power down the eMac.

3. Power on the eMac holding down the T key, which boots it in "Target disk mode". This makes the eMac act as an external firewire drive instead of as a computer used directly.

4. Connect the two Macs with your firewire cable. You should see the eMac's disk appear as a volume on your powerBook.

5. Find your old home folder on the eMac and copy all the files within it to the PowerBook, replacing all of the folders in the home folder of the new user from Step 1.

6. Disconnect the firewire cable and power down the eMac. Once you are sure everything is off of it, you have a choice of methods for cleaning off your old files before you sell it.

7. Set permissions on the files you copied to the PowerBook. There are a couple way to do this, and I'm not sure which way is best. I would use the Terminal, but maybe it can be done right in the Finder. Let's see if another MacRumors member voices an opinion before we talk about the details.

The filesystems in Jaguar and Panther are the same, and they layouts of directories you might care about are almost the same.

Are there other files you want to get off the eMac besides files in your home folder?

 

Here are some more details about setting ownership/permissions. Each file you move will have ownership data ("who owns the file?") and permissions ("can the owner or others read or write the file?"). After you copy a home directory, I suspect that the permissions will be OK, but that the owner of all the files may be wrong.

To set the ownership of all the files under the home folder of user "myname" using the Finder:

1. Log in as root.

2. Find the home folder /Users/myname (where "myname" is the name of the user) and select it.

3. Select File -> Get Info.

4. Click the Ownership & Permissions triangle if necessary to display the full details.

5. Click the padlock and type an administrator's password if prompted.

6. Set the Owner to "myname" (where "myname" is the name of the user).

7. Click "Apply to enclosed items".

8. Close the Get Info window.

To set the ownership of all the files under the home folder of user "myname" using the Terminal application:

1. Launch the Terminal application.

2. Type this fancy command, very carefully:

Code:

sudo find /Users/myname -exec chown myname {} \;

(where "myname" is the name of the user). The last four punctuation characters are open curly brace, close curly brace, backslash, and semicolon.

3. Quit the Terminal application.