Migrating from osX 10.4 to 10.7?

Hi folks, I've just run out and bought a new MacBook Pro, after about 7 years of using my Powerbook which has finally become un-upgradable.

When I came to use the Migration Assistant it started telling me that I needed to upgrade the software on my old machine? The Powerbook G4 is running on osX 10.4 and can't be upgraded any further since it doesn't have an intel chip; The migration assistant in os x lion doesn't seem very happy playing with anything below snow leopard.

Does anyone have any clues for me on how i'm going to be able to make this work, i'm toying with the idea of just copying it all over manually but there's got to be a better way of doing this than that! plus i can't seem to find any copies of the CDs for things like MS office and the like.

Any advice would be great fully received, I'm pretty close to smashing them both up with a hammer at the moment!!

I would try starting the Powerbook in in Target Disk mode (you'll need a Firewire 800 to 400 cable). Then, when you run the Migration Assistant, choose to restore from "another volume on this Mac" instead of from another Mac.

The Migration Assistant should just see the other Mac as a "drive" and pull the files over.

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Alas you are going to find a reasonable amount of difficulty as the MBP running Lion will not handle PPC software, and this will include earlier editions of Office etc.

I'm not too worried about office, it's migrating iTunes and my iPhone back up that I'm worried about, I need to setup my new iPhone and I can't do it using my old laptop, it's a big confusing mess and it's starting to get a bit annoying!

This is very odd to hear, as I've run Migration Assistant for a lot of folks upgrading from a G5 or G4 and had no problems -- though now that I think about it, all of them were probably running Leopard.

If you can secure a RETAIL copy of Leopard (which does support PPC machines; don't confuse it with Snow Leopard, which doesn't) inexpensively, then I think that's your answer.

Otherwise, I'd suggest just copying the stuff that's important onto a thumb drive and moving it over that way.