Need OS X Help: New HD, Want to move OS X Intact from Old (PowerBook)

Factual Questions
1

I am on a WallStreet, upgrading the hard drive from a Toshiba 18 to an IBM TravelStar 60. I still have the Toshiba on hand (with the complete OS X installation that I want to bring over for use on the new HD) in an Expansion Bay kit, but I cannot boot MacOS X from the expansion bay.

I have spent the weekend running Carbon Copy Cloner in MacOS X from the old HD, thus copying all files to a new empty (< first 8 gigs of new HD in case anyone asks) partition on new HD; shutting down; swapping the new HD into the internal ATA HD slot and the old one into the Expansion Bay carrier; rebooting; swapping Startup Disks to the cloned OS X partition on new HD; getting errors at the Open Firmware prompt; installing OS X from scratch from OS 10.1 installation CD to new partition; shutting down; swapping drives so old HD is in internal ATA HD slot and new one is in Exp Bay carrier & reboot / switch startup to old OS X partition; reboot; running Carbon Copy Cloner to copy files once again; … <sigh>

[rant] I moved Mac OS 8.1, 8.6, 9.0.4, and 9.2 from the old HD to the new HD by drag-n-drop and they work fine. The first three of these System Folders was copied via drag 'n drop from the even earlier, original IBM 8 gig WallStreet hard drive. The 8.1 System Folder was copied via crossover cable from my PowerMac 7100’s 2.1 gig hard drive, again via drag-n-drop, and that in turn had been copied from the 7100’s original 500 MB HD. Now I am having more problems than I have the patience for trying to move my copy of OS X from one drive to another, and I am in no mood to tolerate an OS that behaves like a d**n Microsoft OS and gives me hassles about this!!! [/rant]

I now have OS X going into startup, showing the progress bar and telling me networking and other services are being started, and for a brief moment I get a flash of the login screen, which disappears, the beach ball spins and spins, then the login screen flashed in front of my eyes for a split second, then beach ball, and so it loops until I hard restart.

a) On the Mac OS X partition I cloned it from, I had it set to automatically log me in, as this is a single-user machine. I am wondering what it means that I am seeing a login screen at all. It does not stay up long enough to let me select a username and enter a password, though, whether root or my usual.

b) On the OS X partition it was cloned from, I had set a bunch of startup items from the Logon SysPrefs pane, some of which were on other partitions of the old HD. I do not know that it is getting far enough along to be trying to access them, aside from which it really ought to be timing out with an error message and not locking up the whole OS in a loop, though, right?

c) Months and months and months ago, I was instructed to edit a plain text file in such a way as to modify the order in which the OS does things so that it would mount other partitions of the same drive before starting virtual memory; and then changed the swap file to one of the other partitions. I was under the impression that this little tweak had been overwritten by the upgrade from OS 10.0.4 to 10.1, but if not that might be causing some problems. Again, though, the symptoms do not seem to match. If this were an evil and unrecoverable kind of Unix error, why would booting get so far and then go haywire as late in the process as it does? The OS starts VM very early on, doesn’t it?

d) I am getting really really really tired of pulling the HD, unscrewing it from the sled, swapping the two hard drives, rebooting, swapping to Mac OS X on the old HD, rebooting, and trying to get the OS X architecture to move over to the new HD using Carbon Copy Cloner. I must have pulled the connectors off one set of HD pins and pushed them onto the other a dozen and a half times this weekend, and sooner or later I’m gonna end up bending a pin in a bad way, and then I will not be in a good mood. Therefore I will resist any suggestions that I swap the drives yet again and do something from within the copy of OS X that boots unless you’re really sure you know what I’ve missed and this is the only way of addressing it.

e) I can and will consider any utility (including commercial and/or expensive ones) that will replicate the universe of one Mac OS X installation somewhere else without having to boot from the source copy to do so. I have room on other partitions of the new HD to install a new temporary copy of Mac OS X just for that purpose alone.

Help!!

PS – in case anyone asks, yes I know there are problems with WallStreets and TravelStar hard drives. Mostly they have to do with the magnet that the WallStreet uses to tell it that you’ve shut the lid and that, therefore, it should go to sleep. (The TravelStar’s own magnet gives WallStreets narcolepsy and they sometimes won’t boot and sometimes won’t come out of sleep). I seem to have gotten around that problem, as witnessed by the fact that I’m booted from the new HD in Mac OS 9 (different partition) with no problem.

Also, I Nortoned and Disk First Aided both the source partition and the destination partition before running Carbon Copy Cloner.

2

I’ve gone through the same thing with my Bronze over and over again when I was trying the Public Beta… not fun doing the swapping of the internal and the expansion bay hard drives.

The problem, though, is that the backup companies insist that there’s still no “real” solution for complete, reproducable backups in OS X due to “issues” with Mac OS’ (or Unix?) use of links, i.e., they can’t be backed up like a “regular” file. Sorry; I don’t have a cite. I only know that I’ve read it around the internet somewhere.

However, for all the trouble that it looks like you’ve already gone through, maybe it’s time to throw in the towel and just do a fresh, clean install of OS X? I know it’s not the suggestion you wanted. :frowning:

3

Hm. I don’t know if this will help, but it worked pretty seamlessly for me:

I bought a new TravelStar (mine’s only a 30 gigger, don’t make fun you 60-gig hunk of man, you) for my titanium Powerbook, graduating from a 10 gig drive. All I did was:

  1. Stuff that wasn’t system or application related, like MP3s, movies, documents, etc. I burned to CDs. That being done…

  2. I wiped my iPod clean. I booted from a 9.2 “emergency” CD I had created and copied all the files from the 10 gig hard drive to my iPod (with all the stuff I’d burned to CD, everything fit in one go.)

  3. I swapped hard drives. This time, I first booted from the OSX install CD and ran Disk Utility from that menu option (I like to format a drive when I get it, call me a purist).

  4. After the format, I rebooted again from the 9.2 CD and copied all the files over from the iPod to the new hard drive.

  5. Finally, I booted again from the OSX CD, without ever trying to boot from the hard drive, and ran the OSX installer. I did this to make sure everything was clean and that files possibly missed in the transfer would be replaced with fresh copies.

Result: a largely problem-free transition. The only quirks that came from the whole process are, to me, quite minor: on occasion, Mail now seems to think that the mailbox files are “in use” and it warns me about this before it opens them. I just click OK and go on. Also, Sharing in the System Preferences panel doesn’t want to open for me. I’ll look into fixing these issues one of these days.

So, that was my trick: doing all my copying by booting from 9.2 CDs.