Leopard Backup Clone to New Lion Mac Migration

[calebmedia]

Heres the story. Power Mac G5 running Leopard dies. I have a cloned backup of the system. I buy a new Mac Mini with Lion installed. Lion turns nose up at my cloned drive... I can't use it as a start up drive or nothing. Migration app is useless as usual... Help?

Drive is a USB 2 and Firewire 400 enclosure drive.

Getting my butt kicked over here...

Thanks!!!

- Caleb

 

[barkmonster]

Heres the story. Power Mac G5 running Leopard dies. I have a cloned backup of the system. I buy a new Mac Mini with Lion installed. Lion turns nose up at my cloned drive... I can't use it as a start up drive or nothing. Migration app is useless as usual... Help?

Drive is a USB 2 and Firewire 400 enclosure drive.

Getting my butt kicked over here...

Thanks!!!

- Caleb

This is just an idea and may not work but it's worth a go:-

1) Create a sparse disk image on your Mac Mini's hard drive of slightly more than equal size to the amount of data you're trying to migrate from the G5s old hard drive using the "New Image" option in Disk Utility.

If it uses 112Gb for example, create one of 120Gb. It means you're not going to run out of space but being a sparse image, you're not wasting any space on you're internal drive either.

Make sure this disk image is formatted as GUID, not Apple Partition Map. The likelyhood is that Lion won't migrate from a non-intel Mac and that likely includes the older partition format of PowerPC/68K Macs.

2) Mount the disk image.

3) Using Carbon Copy Cloner, clone the contents of the old hard drive to the disk image. The default setting will do, don't use block copy, just use the "copy everything, don't delete anything on the destination" option.

4) Once that's finished, use Migration Assistant to move your system from the mounted disk image.

http://www.bombich.com/download.html

 

[Fishrrman]

"Lion turns nose up at my cloned drive... I can't use it as a start up drive or nothing. Migration app is useless as usual... Help?"

First things first.

When you plug the cloned backup into the Mini, what happens?

Does it mount on the desktop?

If it does, there are other ways to migrate your apps and data.

 

[AdrianK]

You can't run Leopard on a 2011 mini, it simply will not work. You'll just have to copy over your data and use Lion.

 

[barkmonster]

You can't run Leopard on a 2011 mini, it simply will not work. You'll just have to copy over your data and use Lion.

I think they're simply trying to use Migration Assistant from the original drive to move their system over. I'd assume Migration Assistant would be intelligent enough to work out that it's just reading files but maybe it checks if the drive it's reading is bootable first and fails it if it's not GUID format.