Tried to connect Macbook to a G5

Question

I have a G5 and want to migrate some files to a new MacBook. I purchased a firewire...(BTW $36.00 at Best Buy "Not a Best Buy") Went to Migration Assistant and followed the directions.. Nothing Then after several tries I got a message "May not be able to connect to old mac by firewire". Huh???. Is the "T" key the key with the "T" on it or something else.. Does anyone know what I am doing wrong. If you do please let me know I would be very apprieciative. Thanks, Steve
IMac G5 Purchased November 2004   Mac OS X (10.3.4)   Now a MacBook too

Answer 1

A machine that is capable of target mode (post blue and white g3 and anything beyond that release date) should be able to do so with any of the released operating systems including: jaguar, panther, or tiger.
The problem with filesystems (IIRC) was that PPC machines needed to have 10.4.4 in order to read the intel mac HFS+ partition table (GPT), however intel macs need only read the Apple Partition Map (APM) from HFS+. Since the G5 machine would be booting into target mode it is basically skipping the operating system and in the PPC case presenting the drive via open firmware. Since the filesystem is readable by the intel mac, it shouldn't make any difference what OS is installed (provided the drive was formatted correctly). There's a kbase article on this, but I couldn't find it so this is mostly from "http://appleintelfaq.com/"
All bets are off if you have your drive formatted in some strange way.
Target mode problems can often be remedied by reversing the procedure (setting the host machine to be the target and copying files to it), cloning your drive to an external and forgoing the machine, or zapping the pram. If your firewire port isn't working you 'may' need to reset the SMU or PMU depending on your macintosh model.
Good Luck,
-j