Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Updating an iBook to Panther -- the paranoid approach

Updating Panther with Classic
Last night I decided that prior to panther I should upgrade 9.2.1 to 9.2.2 (Panther doesn't contain Classic, you need a prior copy.) Booted Classic, ran update, got updates. Looked fine, booted up, put iBook to sleep, woke it up --- white screen. Had to restart -- got the evil folder with the question mark of doom. Booted off classic boot cd (came w/ ibook), found system folder on hard drive and switched startup disk back to os x. Restarted ok. Bad sign on several fronts. Reaffirmed my dark opinion of Apple's QA capabilities.

Now I'm leaning towards the Panther migration strategy of doom, which will also free up a GB or so of HD space. I'm guided here by a Tidbits ebook I downloaded for $5 (highly recommended), this is the kind of ultra-paranoid path the author took.

0. Do a full Backup 2.0 backup of the iBook to my server in addition to my usual Retrospect backups.
1. Put classic on a disk image (http://googlefaughnan.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_googlefaughnan_archive.html#106717816038176570)
2. Refresh my iPod, cleaning it out totally (so I've got a 30GB external drive). Move classic disk image to iPod. (Maybe try moving iMovie 2 to iPod to see if I can keep it.)
3. Do an archive and install on iBook, then move archive and home folder and applications, etc to iPod.
3. Do a complete HFS+ journaled reformat of iBook, including classic drivers, from Panther.
4. Clean install Panther on iBook then apply updates and install Retrospect client into Panther.
5. Move items back from iPod, refresh iPod and sync to restore music. Keep copy of the classic folder there for future use.

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