Advice moving DP/Projects from G5 to Mac Pro 8-core

[James Steele]

I gotta say up front, this thread isn't about me, but I got a call from a good friend who is wrapping a deal right now as I write this on a lightly used Nehalem 8-core. He's going to need some advice on how to set up and partition the new machine. I think it's got 8GB RAM and comes with two 2TB drives installed.

Hopefully he'll sign up here and join this thread, but I'll send him a link. Any suggestions for how to make the transition, please post so he can see it and get a head start on things would be good for now.

I know he's on DP 7.12 and planning to upgrade to 7.2 when he's made the move to the new machine. He's going to run SL as well. We all know he should put projects on a separate drive, but I'm wondering how he should partition his drives. He'll probably want an additional drive for storing sample libraries as well.

So... if you were moving from G5 to a new Nehalem 8-core, how would you set it up? I'll send him a link to this thread. Thanks in advance.

[FMiguelez]

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He could use Migration Assistant, but I really do not recommend that. Especially not if he's moving from PPC to Intel.

If he wants a more reliable and trouble-free system, I'd instal everything from scratch, James. I know it's a PITA, but he can cry all he wants when his system is rocking solid because of this

As for the data (DP projects, etc.), I'd probably copy it manually (I suppose they are all gathered in some kind of archive folder or something).

Regarding partitions, it depends on a lot of things. According to iPartition's manual (you recommended this app to me, BTW), the FIRST partition is the FASTEST one on the drive, so for the System disk, if he is going to partition it (recommended), I'd definitely suggest to put all system files in that first partition (the first area you see in Disk Utility).

Same goes for the other drives (Audio-DP and Samples drive).

In my case, for my OnSite location backups, I've crossed backed up everything in the second partitions of each drive respectively (System partition cloned in the second partition of the Audio Drive, and the Audio partition for the Audio Drive cloned (incrementally) to the second partition of the System Drive).
For the G5 I have 2 Samples drives. Each has 2 partitions. And they are also crossed-cloned in their respective partitions. Let me insist again that the Samples should go in the FIRST partition.

The idea is that if one of my HDs dies, I can instantly recover with no wasted time.

Actually, I'm in the process of perfecting my partition/backup/cloning scheme. It takes a LOT of thinking and experimenting (I've blown and nuked a few of my drives by accident during my tests, but could quickly recover from the clones).

Also, it's a good idea to make another small partition in any drive that IS NOT the systm drive (it could be the audio or Samples drive) where he can have a "lite" OSX installation. This is where he could put all the repair utilities (CCC, Onyx, DW, TTP, etc.). This is good for repairing the system disk, repairing permissions, and more importantly, being able to do a sector-by-sector clone of the boot drive.

Hope this helps him

[bayswater]

I agree that it is best to install everything fresh, rather than try to copy or migrate over, especially if you are moving to a new OS X version. Data files are easily copied over by linking the two Macs with an ethernet cable and enabling file sharing.

As for partitioning, why do it at all? Better to have a drive each for system, projects, samples, etc. The only partition that I'd bother with is a small second one on the system drive to use for testing new OS X releases to ensure everything is compatible before updating the working system drive. Since you would only start up from one or the other, there would be no drawback to having these two partitions on one drive.

[HCMarkus]

FM is onto something with the "Cross-Backup" approach, and this is a good reason to partition drives. It is also very handy to keep the last "known good" system partition on hand in case an "upgrade" turn out to be flakey. I always clone my system before upgrading or making any significant changes, and find housekeeping is much easier given a solid partitioning scheme.

I'll add another +1 to starting from scratch on the installation.

[bayswater]

FM is onto something with the "Cross-Backup" approach, and this is a good reason to partition drives. It is also very handy to keep the last "known good" system partition on hand in case an "upgrade" turn out to be flakey. I always clone my system before upgrading or making any significant changes, and find housekeeping is much easier given a solid partitioning scheme.

I'll add another +1 to starting from scratch on the installation.

Like I said, it makes some sense to have a second partition on the system drive to try out new system updates until they're stable, but partitioning the drive so one partition can be a backup has risks. If the drive fails, you apt to lose the original and the backup. (Having said that, the only time I've lost data because of hard disk failure was with a 40MB Apple drive on a Mac LC.)

[FMiguelez]

FM is onto something with the "Cross-Backup" approach, and this is a good reason to partition drives. It is also very handy to keep the last "known good" system partition on hand in case an "upgrade" turn out to be flakey. I always clone my system before upgrading or making any significant changes, and find housekeeping is much easier given a solid partitioning scheme.

I'll add another +1 to starting from scratch on the installation.

Like I said, it makes some sense to have a second partition on the system drive to try out new system updates until they're stable, but partitioning the drive so one partition can be a backup has risks. If the drive fails, you apt to lose the original and the backup. (Having said that, the only time I've lost data because of hard disk failure was with a 40MB Apple drive on a Mac LC.)

Yeah, but that's why I said those would be the ON-SITE location backups.
Obviously, one must also have OFF-SITE location backups too, otherwise you have nothing.
If you lose the system drive you also lose the AUDIO backup, but who cares? You have another backup copy of the Audio drive safely at home. And in the case of projects, in addition to everything, you would also have DVD backups...

The idea is to use the FASTEST (first) partitions for each disk (System, Audio, Samples), and in the spare space left of each HD do the cross backups for the onsite location, for convenience.

I mean, one could just simply buy extra HDs for all the on-site backup purposes, but this is more expensive, especially if there's tons of spare space on each drive (he mentioned he will be using 2 TB drives).
I just can't think of a more convenient and cheap way of doing these things.

And this thing is a total beauty in terms of ease of use, convenience and options:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20 ... gy/U2S3HD/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I just mentioned what has worked great for me so far.

[bongo_x]

Funny, I’m doing that same migration right now. And no, I don’t have any good advice.

I usually use the migration assistant, but it’s such a jump in machine, OS, and I’ve got a ton of crap on the old one, so I’m doing it from scratch. Ugh.

bb

[FMiguelez]

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Oh, and this may seem paranoia on my part, but one should also have Time Machine backups. I still haven't done those, but I'm planning on how to do it best on my setup.
I'm still reading articles about TM because I want to see how many computers I can backup in each TM HD, and I need to decide on Volumes VS accounts, especially for my office machine and the iMac.
Planning, planning, planning...

Here's a diagram I'm sketching because I'm redoing and perfecting my backup scheme. It's not finished, and it only shows one computer with all its HDs and their partitions. Time Machine backups are not there yet.
Also, I think I will spread the offsite location drive into two drives instead of only one:

[James Steele]

It's funny-- I've seen everybody say to avoid migration assistant, but when I moved from my G5 to my Mac Pro 1,1 I thought it would be "temporary" so I installed a new boot drive in the Mac Pro and also put my G5 boot drive in it. I then booted from the Snow Leopard installer disc and installed the system onto the new drive in the Mac Pro. When the installer asked about migrating, I migrated by pointing the installer to the G5 boot drive (did not use FireWire).

I know this is "not supposed to work" but everything transferred seamlessly. DP was working great. On top of it all my email transferred etc. I kept the boot drive from the G5 in the Mac Pro for a while to grab files etc to make sure I had everything I needed.

I have to wonder if maybe one should try migration assistant and see if they have a problem first?

[dinobass]

I used Migration Assistant from a PPC to an Intel and had issues, but I was also going from Tiger to Leopard and from DP 5 to DP 6. It was hard to tell who was playing nice or not, so I started from over from scratch and just installed everything manually. There are helpful sites online that show you how to move keychains, passwords, etc., but I don't have them handy anymore. It certainly takes extra time to do it all manually, but if anything goes wrong, even months down the line, you can immediately rule out any migration shenanigans.

[BobK]

I moved from a G5 to an 8-core Nehalem earlier this month.

I don't create multiple partitions.

I had all my audio projects and sample data on a second internal drive in my G5, and I just moved it to the Mac Pro.

I used Migration Assistant, and I think I checked off every option without thinking too much about it. So far I've had two problems which might have been related to MA.

1. The Network System Preference panel showed only one ethernet port - the Mac Pro has two. When I first got the machine home, I'd booted it from the stock 1 TB internal drive, on which the previous owner had freshly installed Snow Leopard, and saw both ethernet ports. Then I decided to use a smaller drive for the system and apps; that's the one where I used Migration Assistant and then saw only ethernet port.

Even though I don't need both ports right now, I wanted to be sure there wasn't a hardware problem while it was still under warranty. I called Apple Care, and after they directed me to trash some preference files, both Ethernet ports appeared. I'm pretty confident that MA was the cause of this problem.

2. I had problems with the Syncrosoft dongle and its License Control Center app for Arturia instruments. LCC wouldn't see the dongle upon launch - I'd have to unplug and then re-plug the dongle. LCC also didn't recognize my hard drive, and I had problems downloading an authorization for an updated version of one of the Arturia products.

I went through several rounds of email with Arturia, and the solution involved entering some commands in Terminal. I'm not sure that MA was the cause of this problem - I came away with the feeling that Steinberg's LCC software needs some work. I had no problem with this stuff on my G5, but I was using earlier software to manage the authorizations.

Otherwise, MA seemed to work pretty well. If I recall correctly, only two apps couldn't be authorized after migration and needed to be reinstalled - Sound Soap 2 and Metric Halo Channel Strip.

[bongo_x]

It can’t hurt to try Migration Assistant first, especially if you’ve got an extra drive. It’s certainly easier. As I said, I usually do that and don’t have any problems, nothing major anyway.

After my last 2 OS upgrades I have various weird problems, some of them permissions I can’t get sorted, and I think it’s time to start fresh.

Like Mr.K mentioned, most problems I’ve had from migrating were solved be trashing a preference file.

bb

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Repeating myself from a previous thread - but worth repeating:

I couple of high level, top-tier customer service technicians have advised me to not use Migration Assistant. The reason? If there are permissions errors on your old machine drives (related to program files in particular) they will simply be copied to the new drive. If you install from scratch, new permissions are created from the OS and installers.

In theory, these permissions should not change, but things happen and they sometimes do. Sometimes they don't.

My wife's Macbook was created from her Mac Mini, in turn from her iBook, in turn from her 7600 - all with Migration Assistant and never a single issue.

My G5 was Migrated from my G4 and again, via internal drives in the G5 when I went to Leopard and I got slammed with very serious permissions issues. The only fix was a clean install, reinstall every program (I cheated on some of the less used shareware and freeware buy dragging to the new disk, but not on any commercial products.)

That was about a year ago and the system has never been better. I'd use Migration Assistant on a "simplistic" machine that doesn't have to use programs with "robust" copy protection, but on a machine using music apps like Finale and DP, I'd never do that. The trickle down, BTW, happens (AFAIK) when programs like DP change settings in drivers (like the M-Audio drivers, for example). Something happens, I don't know what it is, so don't ask, but it screws up the permissions and things can get wonky.

[FMiguelez]

I have to wonder if maybe one should try migration assistant and see if they have a problem first?

Yeah, perhaps.
The thing is that most problems tend to creep up at the LEAST convenient moment.... Murphy's law dictates that everything will be fine during his testing, but will present problems in the middle of a project

I'm kidding, of course, but I guess he could try MA first to see how everything translates. But he would have to make extensive tests and stress everything to detect potential problems.

I wouldn't use MA, though. Saving a little time now can cost him wasting more time down the line anyway, why risk it with your production machine? It's a pretty big change!
Maybe for his laptop MA would be just fine...

Who the hell was "Murphy", anyway?

[climber]

I've upgraded from a G5 to a Mac Pro 8 core over the past couple of weeks. I decided to just reinstall everything & aside from the time spent, have had no issues. one thing about doing things that way is that I installed less stuff. lots of stuff that I never used was on my old machine and it hasn't made it over. I have found a few things I've needed & just installed them when the need arises.

boy, big difference between the 2 machines...