G5 Pro hard drive swap

[Mort]

Yo

One of the designers at work is having issues with her G5. It randomly wont power on some mornings and is generally a pain. Its about 3 years old, but we have a newer dual core one going spare at the mo and she wants to move to that.

Is it possible with macs as it is with PC's to just swap the hard drive out and everything will be cool on the new machine? As will save her a day or 2 reinstalling and setting everything up.

Long time PC user but pretty clueless with macs

Cheers

 

[Combat squirrel]

No long story short, also u can't do that with pcs unless it's the exact same hardware?! Or u mean jus add it as an additional drive to copy files over?

 

[Mort]

you can on PC's, might need to install / remove drivers but it will work

and cool no worries, cheers

 

[Combat squirrel]

Not if it's a diff CHipset on pc it won't work ,u must have got lucky,generally it's a bad way of doing things though always best to do a clean install

 

[Will_3rd]

It will probably kernel panic if you try and do it as the hardware differs a bit.

Would probably be best to copy over the applications and files by plugging the old drive into the newer one and copying the data over.

 

[artaxerxes]

Use Migration Assistant!

 

[Spyhop]

Wouldn't rate the chances, but worth a try if you can make a backup image of the drive first.

 

[FreeStream]

Give it a go!

Don't loose anything from trying!

 

[Feek]

Use Migration Assistant!

^^^^^

 

[Doug]

If they're both G5 PowerMacs then there shouldn't be any problems simply transplanting the old hard drive.

If you were moving to intel, you'd be up a certain creek and have to migrate the system.

TBH, migration doesn't take a whole lot of time I upgraded the drive in my MBP and had the old drive in a usb adapter, the whole process was done in less than half an hour.