Safe to Migrate?

[ensee]

Hi,

I've been using my mac for about two and a half years now - it's a 1.25GHz eMac which still runs perfectly well but at christmas it's being joined by a shiny new MacBook.

In this time I've filled my existing mac up with thousands of documents for school, photos, music tracks and all the trappings of a rich iLife. I want to bring these over onto my new mac come christmas morning so I bought a 6-pin to 6-pin firwire cable which I thought would let me go through the migration assistant just fine.

I read a little further into the migration assistant (never a good thing) and some sites recommend cleaning up the mac I'm migrating from (eMac) first. I ran the disk utility but it couldn't verify the disk because some months ago I balls'd up and emptied the ".../library/receipts" folder thinking it didn't matter.

I could salvage it but with just 2GB of disk space left I don't feel like reinstalling Tiger...

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone could help out. Can I still boot up the new mac and migrate everything just fine or am I safer transferring things one by one in target disk mode?

(PS. If target disk mode's preferable can someone tell me how to get into it and where all my application/network settings are hiding?)

Thanks,
Neil

 

[Westside guy]

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone could help out. Can I still boot up the new mac and migrate everything just fine or am I safer transferring things one by one in target disk mode?

(PS. If target disk mode's preferable can someone tell me how to get into it and where all my application/network settings are hiding?)

Since Migration Assistant will access the old disk in target disk mode, I don't think these two options are significantly different. Nothing on your new computer will get overwritten, and nothing on your old computer will get deleted. However if there are apps that you broke on your old computer (when you deleted stuff in /Library), they won't work on your new computer either without reinstalling.

Migration Assistant lets you pick and choose what you want to migrate; so if you're concerned you can just move your home directory (Documents etc.) but not the network settings or applications.

 

[ensee]

That sounds great, thanks.