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Dude, where’s my Firewire? Macbrick Migration 101
Hey Herd,
With all the freaking out about firewire (or lack thereof) last week I thought I’d give a brief note on the experience of migrating a friend/client’s new macbook from an old macbook pro.
Our process began with a shiny new macbook (1299). The standard HD size for this model is 160 gigs, which we immediately replaced with a 320 gig drive. That process was very simple. The hard drive/battery cover pops open with the pull of a lever, you unscrew a single mount, and swap the drives out. One caveat – there are screws the the aforementioned mount clamps down on in the sides of the original HD. You need pliers to pull them out – otherwise your new HD will bounce around with nothing to hold on to. That said, the process still only takes 5 minutes. Once installed, I formatted the new HD and installed leopard, ran a few updates, and we were good to go with migration.
My friend was migrating from a work supplied MBP with photos on the laptop, and also had an external firewire HD with movies and music on it. The new migration assistant says that you can do it over a network, but we consistently had issues losing network connection when connecting the macs to each other via wireless migration. Since we didn’t have ethernet cables and gigabit router – just an airport express (did you guys know that was upgraded to wireless n now? A pleasant surprise.), we moved on to plan b. We had an extra USB 1TB drive to work with, so we used Super Duper to clone her MBP hard drive to the usb drive (by the way, 1 TB at Best Buy for a 7200rpm External Simpletech drive is now $195). Using USB migration for pictures and some music was fast, but it created a new user for that data rather than allowing an option to import the media into a user that we’d already built, so that was annoying. We didn’t migrate her apps because it was a work computer we were migrating from.
Throughout this process, mobileme was just not working right. The new mac wouldn’t sync data to save it’s life. Finally, after a few hours, it started syncing, but for the longest time it would just keep saying ‘never synchronized’, and wouldn’t update anything.
Now we had to get media off her external firewire only hard drive. We had to use her MPB to copy to the new USB drive because that was the only mac with a firewire port at this point. Luckily it was only 160 gigs, so a sushi dinner later and we were back in business and imported everything from the usb drive as one normally would.
I left wishing that her macbook had a firewire port, but knowing that after today she wouldn’t need it (we’re retiring the old firewire drive).
So to recap the experience.
Firewire: Missed it, but won’t miss it anymore.
Target Disk Mode: I will always miss it. One of my favorite mac-isms is gone. It would have made our lives easier yesterday.
MobileMe: I love it – but when it decides to screw you, it SCREWS you.
The New Macbook: A few hours with this new smooth trackpad and you’ll hate the old one. I cannot brag on it enough. The hard drive accessibility is really great, too. Overall you can truly feel the sturdiness of the computer. The LED screen is plenty bright and the whole thing just feels good.
Airport Express: Maybe I missed the bus here but I’m glad to see it’s “wireless-n” now.
Migration Assistant: Only good now with a usb HD clone or over gigabit ethernet (and I can’t confirm that, either). Over wireless it’s just not gonna cut it.Perhaps this will be useful to those of you who leap to the new macbook & pros.
John
Magic Feather Inc. -
4 Replies
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As an aside to this, apparently the USB ports on the new MacBooks are now working at full capacity.
https://www.lesnumeriques.com/news_id-6445.html -
Can’t agree enough with everything you have said about Mobile Me – I never had any problems with .Mac
However, I’m not sure what the point of a MacBook is now for video – the USB2 format will not support a decent media drive, so it’s no good to users on the Cow…
Thanks for the info. I have read in other places that migration can be achieved via a Time Capsule (or possibly another Time Machine drive) and this can be done wired. Not sure what the exact deal is, but it sounded fairly easy…
Ben
Edit Out Ltd
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FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer -
[Ben Holmes] “so it’s no good to users on the Cow… “
Sure it is, just not for video editing. Not sure why anyone would want to edit FCP on a 13″ laptop anyway. I have a 15″ MacBook Pro that I don’t use for editing except on very rare occassions because it’s just too small for me. I use it for email, the Cow and documents.
I looked at the 13″ Macbook last night and when it’s time for me to replace this or do a lot of traveling I’ll probably consider picking up one of those since the price is about right.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Working with it some more today – the trackpad is truly addicting. Going from the new macbook to the old macbook pro is kind of painful now. It’s a sleek machine.
John
Magic Feather Inc.
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