Setup Assistant: transfer from a firewire drive?

[ifjake]

i'm preparing to upgrade to Tiger. what i want to do is do erase everything and start from scratch, even reinstalling my apps, which shouldn't be too big a deal. the only thing that i'm curious about is my home folder. i have done a clean reinstall of panther before and i know what i need to do terminal-wise to get it to work, but i'm concerned about simply copying all of my home folder from my backup drive, including my Library folder with old panther preferences in it, onto the drive and then forcing the system to change where the user directory is coming from. i'm not sure if that would fly.

Tiger has this new Setup Assistant feature i see on the website. is it able to treat a firewire drive like a computer and properly copy over users from it and such? if i used something like CarbonCopyCloner to make my firewire drive exactly like my computer as it is now would it work right? anyone know of the best way to do a clean install of tiger from a firewire drive?

 

[panphage]

The setup assistant works fine from an external HDD. I think it has to be a bootable clone, but I'm about to do the cycle you describe: Clone, erase, install tiger, migrate users with setup assistant.

 

[ifjake]

good. tell me how it went when you're done.

 

[yellow]

Choose the 'info on another partition' setting in Setup Assistant. Select your FW drive. It does the rest.

 

[FlyersFan77]

Using the Setup Assistant more than once?

I used the setup assistant to migrate all of my information from my PowerMac to my new PowerBook when I purchased it a few months back. Everything went flawlessly. My question is, can the setup assistant be used more than once. Everything that I have read on Apple’s support site leads me to believe it is a one-time deal. It can only be used on a new Mac once during the initial startup. What I would like to do is a clean install on my PowerBook then migrate all my information again from my PowerMac. Does anyone know if the Setup Assistant is a standard process with a fresh Tiger install where it wasn’t with previous versions (Panther, etc.)? Has anyone tried this? Thanks.

 

[panphage]

Everything went absolutely swimmingly.

FlyersFan77: The setup and migration assistants are both sitting there in the Utilities folder, so I imagine you can use them whenever you please. If you're moving over your users, it's probably best to do during the install, because then you don't have to set up a new user that you're not going to use.

 

[Horrortaxi]

Your external drive does need to be bootable and yes you can run the Migration Assistant more than once. And if anybody ever asks you, Target Disc Mode on a MDD G4 only activates the drive location where the boot drive originally was. If you've added drives and now boot from something other than the original then Migration Assistant won't work right. Boy the fun I had figuring that out.