Upgrading from Jaguar to Tiger

Question

Hello,
I'm hoping that some brilliant individual will be able to help me with this "situation." I am trying to upgrade a good family friend's eMac to Tiger from Jaguar 10.2.8 (technically they meet the Leopard requirements, but I think that Tiger would run better with the setup that they currently have). Like a good boy, I want to back up their hard drive before I upgrade. This is where the problems begin. They don't have an external hard drive and the cd/dvd drive is read only for dvds. I brought over my Iomega external drive, but it would not show up when I connected it to their computer, either with firewire or with USB (the system profiler recognized and knew what it was, but I could not access the drive anywhere - I'm not really sure why). The one backup program that I found that still worked with Jaguar could not recognize the external drive either and it would not let me backup to the internal drive. I don't really want to spend forever backing up their stuff onto cds. They have around 18 gigs of stuff on their hard drive, although not all of that needs to be saved. Target disc mode does not work between my model of macbook and the eMac according to Apple (I tried it - turns out they were right). Will the migration assistant work? I've thought of buying an external DVD burner, since I am interested in owning one myself. Is there one out there that will work with this eMac and my macbook? Any other ideas? A flash drive would work, but also would be tedious. I was hoping to be able to let a backup utility do its thing and not have to manually back-up this drive. Anyone?
Message was edited by: Clayek

Answer 1

At least with the eMac in FW TDM and attached with the correct cable
to the newer Intel-based Mac, you could use the optical drive in the
newer Mac to archive larger size files than with a CD-RW drive in eMac.
Few if any Jaguar-based items would really do all that well in Tiger;
and the few that could be OK (AppleWorks 6, etc) could be extracted
from the Jaguar-based original eMac install-restore disc set through
the use of the utility Pacifist in its demo mode and installed in Tiger.
For that much trouble, if one needed an office-like suite, get NeoOffice.
It does word-like stuff and spreadsheet, & so on; it's a free download.
The external drive may show up in the eMac's Disk Utility; if it does, that
may be a time to see if it can be partitioned and formatted for Mac. If not
already. The newer Macs may offer a different format than the eMac is
comfortable in using; since Intel-based Macs can use different schemes.
You could see if the external drive can be used by the Intel-Mac for moved
content from the FireWire TDM-booted eMac, to be archived on the external.
Anyway, sounds like fun. The easiest thing would be upgrading the eMac RAM.
(In Tiger, after upgrading to 10.4.11, be sure to get all the Java upgrades, the
last Security Update, Quicktime, new browsers, Adobe Shockwave + Flash,
Adobe Reader, and consider a few widgets such as iStat Pro, and DashQuit.
The OnyX version for Tiger is a good utility from Titanium Software, too.
The system discs which shipped with the Intel-based computer won't work in
the PPC computer; nor will other model's specific disc sets. You'd need retail 10.4.
Good luck & happy computing!