MacPro & PowerMac G5 swap

[Deep_Thought]

Hi,

Colleague and I at work are swapping desktops as I need ot run VMWare and he no longer does so I will be having his MacPro and he my PowerMac - whats the quickest way to swap? He's suggested swapping the HD's over but I dont think that will work due to the PowerPC and Intel software differences... right?

If that wont work then how can we do it as painless as possible?

Cheers!

 

[DoFoT9]

i would suggest backing up with Time Capsule, then doing a "archive and reinstall" using the leopard DVD... that seems the easiest. make sure that you swap restore discs too

i have seen no reports of a computer still booting when swapping architectures, so i doubt that it will work by just swapping the HD's. that generally only works when swapping to similar platforms. i.e. intel to intel.


seems like your getting a pretty good deal! a G5 will get flogged by any MP!

 

[TrapOx]

I smell BS. Why would anyone in their right mind trade a computer worth $2200 for one worth $900?

 

[Deep_Thought]

yep, although they are both 4GB, PM has 2.5GHz quad core so its not too slow, main reason I want to swap is for the VMware i need to use!

 

[Deep_Thought]

Slight change of plan, we've got another MacPro running 10.4 Server, with 4 500Gb drives, 3 raided to give a 1.4TB drive and 1 left as is for the OS, I'm probably going to use this instead, but can I just swap the 3 5ooGB (1.4TB Raid) over between machines without losing the RAID? Of course I'll re-install the Server onto the PowerMac system drive...

Will this work?

 

[DoFoT9]

Slight change of plan, we've got another MacPro running 10.4 Server, with 4 500Gb drives, 3 raided to give a 1.4TB drive and 1 left as is for the OS, I'm probably going to use this instead, but can I just swap the 3 5ooGB (1.4TB Raid) over between machines without losing the RAID? Of course I'll re-install the Server onto the PowerMac system drive...

Will this work?

thats an excellent idea! it will work like a charm! im not too sure how to change over the RAID software wise, hopefully the MP will recognise its already in RAID and do it automatically, if not i have no idea how to do it. great thinking though.

 

[sickmacdoc]

Slight change of plan, we've got another MacPro running 10.4 Server, with 4 500Gb drives, 3 raided to give a 1.4TB drive and 1 left as is for the OS, I'm probably going to use this instead, but can I just swap the 3 5ooGB (1.4TB Raid) over between machines without losing the RAID? Of course I'll re-install the Server onto the PowerMac system drive...

Will this work?

Your new solution does sound better and should prove to be simpler.

In any case, just make sure the current contents of the RAID are backed up before you start. Assuming the three drives are currently using Apple Software RAID (I would check Disk Utility to see if that is true and that it is not being done with SoftRAID or RAID hardware) you may well have to re-establish the RAID in the new machine- at least that is the experience I had with one MacPro with just a two drive Apple software RAID. The RAID definitions on the original MP appeared to be stored in a configuration file somewhere that I could never find- not that I looked overly hard to be honest. When I installed them in the replacement MP, Disk Utility on the new machine did not display any knowledge of the RAID set as I had hoped, so I simply established a new set, erased them and restored from the backup so no big deal really.

Hopefully yours may show and make it even simpler- but if not, then having a current clone of the contents makes it almost as simple- and makes it safe transformation!

 

[Deep_Thought]

Thanks, it is a software RAID using Disk Util - so I should be ok right? making a backup now but would prefer not to have to....

 

[sickmacdoc]

Thanks, it is a software RAID using Disk Util - so I should be ok right? making a backup now but would prefer not to have to....

Well, I don't know how to answer that honestly. Like I mentioned I had to re-establish a two drive Apple software RAID and restore the data from backup in a similar transfer between two Mac Pros, but I suppose yours could work differently... I just don't want to see you lose any info when you are trying it out. Has the data currently on there not been getting backed up even on the previous system?

 

[Deep_Thought]

Yes, however I've decided to reconfigure the RAID anyway now, as we had 4 500GB drives I'm going to mirror 2 to give 500GB with redundancy and 1 500GB for non critical, leaving the 4th drive for the OS...

Thanks for all the advice, just need to get the PowerMac ready now with Server do I can do the swap on Saturday!