Monday, March 17, 2008

Moving to the new machine using Migration Assistant and Winclone

This has been a long weekend without even touching the computer(s). But now I'm back, ready for the next (and hopefully final) step on the way to be fully installed on the newest MacBook Pro. I have decided to attempt to move the Mac OS X stuff using the Migration Assistant (Flyttassistenten in Swedish) and, once all that has been moved, use WinClone to move the Windows XP partition that I use in Boot Camp and VMWare Fusion.

From a bit of Googling it seems that using WinClone is the preferred way to move the Windows stuff to the new machine. Unfortunately, twocanoes.com is down at the moment, so I just posted on a Swedish Mac forum for an alternative link, since it seems there is no alternative download site for WinClone out there.

I started out by moving the Mac OS X user from the old machine to the new one without any problems whatsoever. Basically I did the following:
  1. On the new machine, I created a new administrator account that I logged back in with.
  2. When logged in as the temporary account, I removed the account that I already had created with the same login name as on the old machine. This is to make sure that there will be no conflicts that arise from already having an account with the login name that is being moved from the old machine.
  3. I started up the Migration Assistant on the new machine.
  4. When it asked me to connect the machine to move the user data from, I booted the old machine in "hard-disk mode" (by pressing "T" during startup), and connected it to the new machine using a FireWire cable.
  5. In the Migration Wizard, I basically opted to move all information from the old machine to the new machine, and after about 10-15 minutes, everything was moved.
  6. I logged out from the temporary account, and logged back in as the just-moved-user. VoilĂ , everything worked perfectly.
Ok, so now, next step is to move the Windows XP Boot Camp partition, but that I will have to get back to as soon as I have been able to download the WinClone application from somewhere.

No comments: