I decided to help my organic farmer friend whom I hadn't seen in 4 years upgrade his G4 400 to Tiger from 10.3.9 and am regretting the day I did this now. We started out changing his drive to a superdrive. Ken has a G4 400 with 2 hard drives a 160 and a 40. He had 10.2.8 on the 40 and 10.3.9 on the 160 with 768 megs RAM. I chose do an archive and install versus an upgrade as he suggested. I chose the archive because that has upgraded 3 of my systems successfully with the famous previous systems which you can later trash.
Things did not work out so well for Ken. The first attempt resulted in a Tiger OS Install error after 90% was installed asking us to reinstall. The second attempt went successfully (2 previous system folders were created). On reboot tiger went to its wonderful pre-menu and was asking him for his dialup facts which is surprising given the fact that the archive is supposed to know all this and on specifying Canada it would give us the American (zip code) form. So Ken backed up to a point with the arrows where the system says that you have another Computer (I assume meaning Another drive/partition: Do you want to add it (very confusing words) which I did not well understand and choices of transferring applications and I don't remember the other choices but 1/2 hour later we had an install where he had to retype his ISP address and his address in American format with zip versus CAnadian postal code version that we could not modify so Ken used an American pretend address to satisfy the FORM.
The system booted up but became
1. Computer runs very Very slow. I believe that the tiger preferences now have 40 gig Jaguar preferences added to them to slow the system to a crawl with lots of spinning balls
2. Applications from 40 were now transferred to 160 gig
3. 40 gig preferences (including Dock Items are from the 40 not the 160
4. 160 gig desktop has disappeared. He kept saying where is my 5 years because his 160 gig desktop disappeared? His desktop is now from the 40 gig.
5. The applications from the 160 are there and it appears that they work. I haven't checked if previously installed itunes 4.9 will work or would only itunes from the Jag 40 gig.
6. Ken had office x on both 40 and 160 and Office 2004 on the 160. His 2004 Entourage had recent contacts that were lost on the install but we were able to recover the huge database of contacts he had thought he lost on the 40 gig and was trying to recover. So he gained 1.2 gig of old contacts and I cannot find the recent ones. Would the Microsoft data transferred in the botched install erase the other Main Identity data base?
7. Is there a special folder where all these 160 gig preferences were stored or is Previous system where I must rebuild his Library?
8. I did not do a lot of searching for 160 gig desktop files but will the search (I did not have a lot of time left to do it) for file names that he remembered that were on the 160 gig desktop find them in a special folder.
9. Can I go and remove the added applications (from 40) that were copied to Applications in 160 gig?
10. Do I have to remove user/library/prefernces for 40 gig applications from 160 gig and maybe it will speed up?
Your help will be greatly appreciated.
I would not do anything more at this point until you have a backup strategy in place for both drives to get key information safe.
How much space is left on the 120 ( it can't be a 160 and be in a G4 400 at full volume size> )
If he values his data some professional or highly savvy help might be the better choice right now.
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My first impression and I am not beside the computer, I have to travel 1 1/2 hrs back on Sunday, is that the installation placed all the files in a different place and I did not have time to stay and do the searches. If the original applications before upgrade are there along with apps transferred from 40 gig, then maybe the data from 160 gig desktop is as well, just that we haven't found where it's hidden. I'm hoping that the Installer did not do a move of data meaning to replace what was already on the 160. You would now if that is a risk of this type of install choice.
Your professional opinion on backups makes complete sense but maybe there is a quick solution to a quirky install gone bad?
Ted
No quick solution - only "Here be Dragons".
It's possible key data may have to be recovered and even that's iffy in this situation.
Desktop files are ALWAYS at maximum risk as they get hammered in any sort of a malfunction.
It's one reason we counsel people to use aliases and the side panel and dock for getting to key data and keeping it safe in the users folder ( tho that's where the desktop SHOULD reside ).
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The first attempt resulted in a Tiger OS Install error after 90% was installed asking us to reinstall
Did you by chance run a disk check and repair permissions before attempting the install? Sounds like your friend's HD might have had a few problems....
And I'll second what MacDoc says - before you do ANYTHING, backup up all the data on those two drives... that will probably mean picking up an external FW drive and taking it along on your next trip.
It might be a case of interleaved files - they make this sort of task humongously difficult to deal with.
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For backups would a Maxtor 200 gig internal in a external case connected thru firewire do the trick. We do not have any fancy IDE cards just the stock ATA that come with G4? Would one do a straight copy of both drives onto partitioned 200 gig thus separating drives into a partition for each? Would you do a regular copy of the contents of each, a carbon copy cloner or do you have a better way?
Ted
Yes that would do - partitioning is a good idea and CCC or maybe better SuperDuper ( seems to do a good job with problem transfers ).
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We have a 160n gig that has been formatted at 120 gig by the G4 as you predicted but would a 200 be formatted only as a 120 and would that be a problem backing up his drives except for capacity problems?
Once backed up, is there any secret place where his original user name desktop and documents may be filed?
Is Super duper readily available and as a next step would it be more convenient to have Macdoc do a data recovery of tha backup or the original drives?
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