Migrating Users/Settings to an External Drive

[ingenious]

I had a problem with a temporary folder and it never completely went away; I still had issues with passwords being remembered and things like that.

It was tolerable in hopes that someday I'd get it fixed, until today.

Today I tried to install Leopard, and it won't install because of this problem (I think.) It says it must wipe the drive because it can't write to it... and Disk Utility on the Leopard DVD says the HD needs repair. I repaired both the drive and its permissions with the Tiger DVD (Leopard DVD wouldn't do it) and it said the drive didn't need repair, but it fixed a myriad of permissions issues.

I honestly cannot afford to wipe this drive, and the only external drive I have is a 250GB USB drive formatted in FAT32, and Carbon Copy Cloner doesn't work with USB drives. I tried SuperDuper! yesterday with cloning an iBook, and when I imaged the clone back to the iBook, it wouldn't start, so I'd rather not user SD! again unless someone can help me with the iBook!

Is there someway to migrate the account and network settings (etc.) to an external volume for use with Migration Assistant after Leopard wipes the drive?

 

[smueboy]

I'm hardly the expert, but i would use SuperDuper to copy your computer to your external drive, then do an Erase and Install of Leopard. Once that is done, you can use Migration assistant to copy all of your settings/keychains etc from Tiger on your external. This should work well.

Alternately, you could make a copy of your Users folder and manually copy all of your settings/preferences etc as suggested here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=4377167&postcount=18

hope that helps.

 

[ingenious]

I'm still having issues...

I started SuperDuper! about 24 hours ago, and it's only copied about 4 GB of data... for some reason, it's effective copy speed is only 0.5 MB/s.

Is this because I'm cloning the startup disk?

Is the method for hand-migrating really sure-fire? I can't afford to lose anything (no, it's not backed up yet, and yes I know that's dumb, and yes I'm working on it! )

 

[smueboy]

If you're running superduper over USB it could be slow, but you should be copying to a HFS+ formatted drive (i don't think superduper will work with a fat32 drive and it may not be able to properly clone your data). format your external drive or make a HFS+ image on the external and clone into that.

I migrated manually when i bought my macbook pro. That was Tiger to Tiger, rather than Tiger to Leopard, but it should be ok. I just copied my iCal plists, cookies, important preferences (such as for programs i have licenses for etc), printer files, Safari bookmark file and Mail folder and all went well.
As long as you have a clone of your computer you always have something to go back to.