Hard Drive Swapping

M

monkeyman

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Hi.

I have two macs at work. One is a Cobalt G4 (450 Mhz, CD-R) and one is a Quicksilver G4 (Dual Processor, Combi Drive). Both are dual boot with OS9.2 and Panther.
I need to switch these machines around for reasons of updating. Is it possible to do a simple swap with the hard drives, or will some aspect of the OS be machine specific and not function in the other machine?

I'm not sure if this is a hardware or OS question, so I'll cross post it in both and apologies if this is in the wrong section.

Any help would be much appreciated as I really need to do this tomorrow. I am hoping I won't need to do a complete install on both machines.

Thanks

matt
 
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double posting isnt allowed, if youre not sure, just post it and a mod will move it to the appropriate place. as far as swapping the drives, it shouldnt be a problem, if youre switching them, make sure its set as master once its installed.
 
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M

monkeyman

Guest
Hi Vincent.

Thanks for such a quick reply - and aplogies for the double post (I'll rmeember that for future use).

Good to hear that the drives should be swappable (by this you do mean that the operating system will boot up and programs will run etc, as opposed to the drive itself being mechanically compatable, right?) - I guess the Panther OS is a generic install accross machines.


Thanks again,

Matt
 
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monkeyman said:
…switch these machines around for reasons of updating…

What does this mean? If it means to get data from one drive to the other you can either set up a network or (even better) transfer data using the "Target Mode" feature. Your computers must meet these requirments
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

This link also gives the steps to accomplish the task.

If "switch these machines around for reasons of updating" means something else…"Ohhh, that’s very different, never mind". (Gilda Radner – Saturday Night Live) Can't beat the original Saturday Night Live gang!

I would set it to Master before it is installed (kinda hard to get my hands down in there :) )
 
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M

monkeyman

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You're quite right - my wording could have been a little bit better there - I'll start again!

At work, I am using a Cobalt G4 (450 Mhz, 896 Ram, CD-R, SCSI)

one of our other machines at work is

Quicksilver G4 (Dual Processor, 512 Ram, Combi, SCSI)

I have been coveting this machine for a while, and now that a colleague is leaving, I plan to switch my machine with that one.
However, if I simply moved the computers from desk to desk I would have the other persons hard drive and not mine. This would mean having to re-install all software and data files etc (time consuming and frustrating).
I had a brain-wave that if I could remove the hard drive of each and simply swap them over, I wouldn't need to do any other installations or updating (probaly a very naive and simplistic view - hey it's good to have hope).
Anyways, so my question was really, is it possible to transplant hard-drives between these two machines and have them continue working, or would each need to be set up from scratch once again? Both are dual boot (OS-9.2 and Panther) - although I don't know how much teh OS becomes tailored to a specific machine on installtion.

Additionally, I would like to be able to take the 512 Ram chip out of the cobalt and put it into the Quicksilver, though I suspect this is probably more problematic (i know Ram is quite machine specific).

Thanks for all your help,

Matt
 
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Go here to check if the ram is compatible between machines. Select your computer family and then your computer model. It will respond with the type of ram available for that machine.

If they are pc100 and/or pc133…
you can move the pc133 to the pc100 computer but it will act like a pc100. You won't be able to use the pc100 in the pc133 machine.
 
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M

monkeyman

Guest
Thanks for the help.

The ram hasn't got a hope of working - very very different spec.

Hopefully the hard drive swap will work - I will post the results.

Matt
 

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