New life for old iMac

Question

My Dad still uses his circa 1998 iMac Rev. D tray loader, since I've kept it alive and up to date by replacing its dead CD-ROM drive from one I bought on eBay, installing more memory (256 MB I think), and OS updates through Panther. He's a cheapskate like me and doesn't want to shell out $1000 for a new iMac. However, lately he's complained this dinosaur was starting to run slow, no surprise since even with a minimal installation of X a few music files and emailed videos left him with less than 400 MB free space on the HD, causing multiple instances of "your startup disk is almost full" messages. Remember this computer shipped with a gargantuan 32 MB memory and a whopping 6 GB hard disk. It ran the latest incarnation of Apple's OS which was OS 8.5. No Firewire on this baby either, so expansion options are limited.
I reasoned I could remove its diminutive 6 GB HD and install the 30 GB HD I pulled from my iMac DV SE some time ago, giving the old iMac some room to breathe. But how to preserve the contents of the hard disk without having to reinstall his programs, files, etc?
Here's how I did it:
Remember there's no Firewire on the Rev. D so there's no way to connect a bootable external hard disk to it. I do have an iPod which has both Firewire and USB cables though. So I connected my 6 GB iPod Mini to the Rev D iMac's USB port, checked "manually manage music" and "enable disk use". Deleted all music files.
Ran Carbon Copy Cloner and cloned the iMac's disk to the iPod (this took a couple of hours over USB). Set the Rev. D aside.
Opened the DV SE and removed its 120 GB HD. Information from this web site was most useful. Installed its original 30 GB. Booted it from my Panther disk and partitioned the HD to contain one 7.9 GB partition and the balance in another. Installed Panther on both partitions. Booted the DV SE to ensure the Panther installation went OK. No problems.
Just for kicks, I set the startup disk to the iPod over Firewire and booted the DV SE from it. Lo and behold it works! there was the old iMac Rev D's old self displayed on my DV SE. Who would think you could use an iPod as a boot disk? Everything worked like it did on Dad's old machine. Weird!
Selected the startup disk to the larger partition of the 30 GB internal HD and booted it. Ran Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the iPod to the smaller partition. This went a little faster since it's now over Firewire. Selected the startup disk back to the smaller partition of the 30 GB HD.
Removed the 30 GB HD and reinstalled the 120 GB in the DV SE. Made sure the the DV SE still works then set it aside.
Opened the iMac Rev. D and removed its pathetically diminutive 6 GB HD. Installed the 30 GB. Closed it up and it attempted to boot. It wouldn't work and got hung on a blue screen. Hmm.
I booted from a Panther disk. I went to reset the user password, but quickly determined there were no users installed on the boot partition. None. Obviously this would present a problem. Apparently it wasn't a good idea to install Panther on the larger partition using an identical user name and password - I think this confused Panther which deleted the account from the boot partition. If I had to do it over again, I would have set up a temporary account so I could boot from the larger partition and use CCC to restore the smaller partition. Anyway, no immediate solution came to mind, so I did an archive and install, preserving user settings and all that.
Oddly enough the only "user" was the system administrator. Fortunately, the system administrator had all the same user settings and files that my Dad had so I simply renamed the home folder, set the login name and password accordingly, and that was that.
For some reason Safari didn't work. Safari would launch, but no window displayed and clicking on the menus did nothing. I could only select "quit" from the Dock. I checked my permissions, trashed the prefs file, everything I could think of, but nothing helped. In desperation I downloaded and installed Safari from Apple's web site (using Firefox which was already installed and fortunately still worked). Amazingly, the same thing happened again. No menus would work. Finally, about to give up, I extracted an older version of Safari from the Panther install disks using Pacifist. That worked! I have no idea what caused this bizarre problem.
Now, back to the reason I started this to begin with. The boot partition is limited to 8 GB which is better than the 6 GB it used to be, but there is only a little more than 2 GB free now. There is another 20 GB on the remaining partition, but how to use it? As I understand it, you can use Netinfo Manager to map the user's "home" directory to another volume. I haven't tried that yet, but when the boot partition nears capacity, I'll give that a shot. I'm not looking forward to the permissions nightmare that may result.
So, success for now. The machine runs like new, sure it's a little slow but he's not running Photoshop or anything. That fan makes a racket – how spoiled we've become.
There was probably an easier way to do all this, but hey, it worked.
By the way my DV SE runs OS X 10.4.9 flawlessly with a new 120 GB HD and 384 MB memory. I have no plans to retire it any time soon.
PB Ti 1 GHz  PB 17 1.33 GHz  iMac DV SE  iMac D  iPod mini    Mac OS X (10.4.9)    Legacy (Appletalk) networked printers  22 years Apple!

Answer 1

Thank you Robert; that's helpful.
The way to map a user's entire Home folder to another volume is simple: In Netinfo Manager, select the desired user, then change his "home" property to the path where you want the new home folder to be. Theoretically this could be any volume anywhere. You can then completely delete the original home folder.
I tried this with a test account and it seems to work ok, I just had one problem with a haxie (cleardock). It won't load its system preference. Don't know if it's related to moving the home folder or not. In any event, I'd do lots of testing before making this change permanent.