What OS is best for a G5 iMac

[garycurtis]

Tonight I'll be picking up my daughter's G5 iMac. I plan to route over my data from my G4 tower via migration assistant. I'm currently running OS 10.5.8.

I don't know what OS my daughter is running. But what works best on this new 'old' machine.

 

[MisterKeeks]

Which one is it?

 

[Intell]

Likely 10.5.8. You could probably boot the iMac in Target Disk Mode, connect the two with a FireWire cable, and clone the G4's hard drive onto the iMac with Carbon Copy Cloner.

 

[eawmp1]

Leopard is as high as you can go.

 

[garycurtis]

My daughter took a screenshot of the About This Mac info screen, but it doesn't tell me much. I'll have the thing in my house tonight, so I'll post back.

I thought that the Migration System route was the best option because it requires a Cat6 cable. And that has got to be faster than Firewire 400.

I'll let you know. And thanks. In a week or two I'm buying a 2012 iMac. I want to get into the 21st Century. Looking forward that sexy Fusion Drive.

 

[Intell]

While Cat6 can be faster for large file transfers, FireWire is faster for many small files which happens to be mostly what OS X is. Also when cloning your G4 over to the G5, you'll have all of your stuff ready to go as soon as it's done. Everything. Migration Assistant is good, but it doesn't get everything.

 

[garycurtis]

When you say Migration Asst. doesn't get everything, do you favor Carbon Copy Clone instead?

In fact most of my data are relatively small files. But along with saved files I want my Keychain data and Network info to carry over. Passwords and such.

 

[Intell]

I've never had great success with Migration Assistant. I've always either cloned or manually moved everything.

 

[garycurtis]

Just to ensure that I'm starting fresh, I could take my OS 10.5 disk and do a clean install. At the end it prompts me to copy over all my data from an old disk. I'm not sure about doing that with a FW cable attached.

Or, I can use Time Machine and do a RESTORE command off the backups on my external LaCie drive.