Tech Goes Boom

G5 and 10.3.4 system migration feature

On the newly released G5s, there is a new feature in the Setup Assistant that launches on first boot. It has been called system migration by macfixit. I thought I would give our readers an in-depth look at this new feature.

This image from the G5 product page briefly describes the new feature of the Setup Assistant. It makes it easy to pull all of your system settings and files to your new machine with almost no hassle. Let's see how it works.

When we first start up the machine, and after our smooth techno welcome, we see this screen offering us the option to transfer our files if we have a firewire equipped machine. Sounds good to me.

Now we're told to attach a firewire cable between our old and new machines. We're reminded to plug into power if we're running a laptop. If you're not plugged in, a sheet will drop down nagging you again. Good call.

This screen tells us to restart the old machine and hold down the T key which boots us into target disk mode. This effectively makes your old machine appear as a hard drive to the new machine. I'm guessing that if you have a startup disk on a Firewire external HD, it would work the same as the OS has no way to tell the difference.

We now get to choose what we want to transfer. We have the following options: Users, Network Settings, Applications Folder, and a nebulous selection called files and folders on "whatever your HD name is". It's assumed that this last selection will get all the miscellaneous stuff laying around your HD that the assistant doesn't recognize as a system file. We'll see how it goes.

The transfer screen. Here we see out progress bar, and right after I took this shot, I got an estimated time of completion at 1 hour and 30 minutes. In reality it took about 15 minutes. Apple and progress bars, what do you do?

When we're all done, we're told to shut down our old machine and disconnect the firewire cable. A click on the Continue button and we're into the Setup Assistant land that we all know and love. As an interesting note, if you have multiple users on your old system, it will allow you to choose which user you would like to use when registering the computer with Apple. I thought this was a nice touch.

The outcome? It got everything flawlessly. Even 3rd party contextual menu plug-ins. I'm very impressed by this. Apple has added a ton of value to the upgrading user experience, and I think they need to make more noise about this. It's a big selling point.

Back in the OS 9 days there was a very nice tool called Clean Install Assistant. It would take all of the files in your system folder that don't belong to a fresh install and put them in a folder, remembering their locations. You could then do a clean install of OS 9 and have Clean Install Assistant move all your files back, no fuss, no muss. Apple now has taken this idea and made it better.

The only real drawback in the process is that the currently shipping G5s that include this feature ship with 10.3.3. You need to update the system with the restore DVDs before running the machine the first time in order to take advantage of this feature. It seems that the machines were set up before the restore DVDs were mastered, and they didn't end up with 10.3.4 installed. The new machines are coming with an insert sheet that explains this as soon as you open the box. While this will only be a problem for a short time, it's a shame that in order to take advantage of this convenient feature, you have to immediately update your system.

These little niceties are really what sets the Mac apart from it's Windows cousins, and it's much appreciated. The only way I can think to improve on it is to include functionality that makes it easy for windows users to switch. Move2Mac already does something like this, and it would be a great addition to the assistant.

All told, the migration feature worked flawlessly for me. I would be interested to see how users of 10.1 and OS 9 fare while using this tool, but from what I can tell, it's very solid, and it wouldn't surprise me if it worked with no issues. Apple really hit one out of the park with this one. My only regret is that it is currently only available with the new G5 systems. The DVD that boots them will not allow for installation on any other mac, unlike previous DVD install discs on other Apple products.

Tomorrow I will show you how to modify the DVD to allow installation of 10.3.4, and this new Assistant as a result, on all machines that currently support 10.3.