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Transferring contents of hard disk

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exverizon

Technical User
Oct 11, 2002
105
US
My old iMac (6 Gig) is filled up, or at least I need to repartition the HD and get it cleared up again...start fresh. My son's iMac is even more stuffed full. I was also considering buying a Mac Mini and transferring the iMac's contents to it. If I do, can I do a direct download using a crossover cable from one to the other? How would that be done? Apple Talk? Never tried this before.
 
What really should be thinking about is an outboard hard drive or 2 - heck of a lot cheaper than buying another computer and gives you a backup of your stuff.

I always buy combo firewire/usb outboard hard drives so that I can plug the thing into anything - like some of out old iMacs and iBooks without firewire ports. You use the firewire when yoo can because of the transfer speed. You just plug it in and it mounts to the desktop.

These things are not expensive and are availabe at places like CompUSA. One mac specialist with good prices and service is 2 of them will cost less than the mini.

If you do want to transfer to another machine, it's easy. You can use a crossover cable to connect directly between 2 machines, but it's usually easier to just get a basic ethernet switch and basic cat 5 cables.

File sharing is easy but it's different on Classic and osx - the Public folder in osx adnt he Shared folder in classic. You did not say which one you use. You can a just go to the help menu and look at file sharing.

If you are loking at a lower priced mac, you might consider the $799 eMac instead of the mini. It's a better machine, with a far faster hard drive and includes a good monitor. It's far easeier to upgrade memory than on the mini. To make it work better, I'd recommend adding 512 mergs of ram. If you go to Apple's online store, you might find refurbs, with same waranty as new macs, at a saxcings of $100 or so,
 
An alternative is getting a second HD connected to the (apple)IDE channel. Needs just some handwork.

Goes like this: Open up the buttom part of the imac, get any ATA cable, burnish the right corner of the cable so it fits in the slightly longer imac IDE+power slot, and there you go already, just a 2way power connector needed to get an addition power thingy for the second HD, and success.

to see on which side to plug in the cable, the connector layout consists like:

-----------------------------------
| IDE | powa |
-----------------------------------

The intern HD, dont know if apple still builds any standard IDE HDs, is at same height as the IDE part of the connector, you see where its longer, there is the power.

. Mac for productivity
.. Linux for developement
... Windows for solitaire
 
You could put your drive in a pc with another bigger drive and use norton ghost to clone the 1st drive to the 2nd drive. Put this new drive in your computer and whalla!! you have a bigger drive.

Joseph Kunder
Technical Systems Specialist
 
I would go with mgalvin's advice. Go with the external Hard Drives. His solution is what I would do and it's what I have done when I had a simmilar issue. It worked out great for me. Good Luck.

Dez
Mix Master Mac
 
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