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From: John Albert on 18 Mar 2010 00:32
RE:
"If I put a iMac G4 running 10.5 into Target Mode, can a
iMac G5 runnning 10.4 actually use Migration Assistant with
it? In the case described, the 10.4 G5 will mount the
Target Mode disk (you see it on the Desktop) but Migration
Assistant just won't recognize it."

I've used Migration Assistant to DOWNgrade from 10.4.11 to
(I think it was) 10.4.10 once on an iMac. I thought that
10.4.11 was the source of a software conflict I was having,
and found that MA worked "backwards" as well as forwards, at
least "within" OS 10.4.x.

Granted, I didn't go from 10.5 "downwards" to 10.4.

But I did "go backwards" within 10.4 with no complaints from
Migration Assistant at all.

- John
From: David Empson on 18 Mar 2010 04:50
John Albert <j.albert(a)snet.net> wrote:

> RE:
> "If I put a iMac G4 running 10.5 into Target Mode, can a
> iMac G5 runnning 10.4 actually use Migration Assistant with
> it? In the case described, the 10.4 G5 will mount the
> Target Mode disk (you see it on the Desktop) but Migration
> Assistant just won't recognize it."
>
> I've used Migration Assistant to DOWNgrade from 10.4.11 to
> (I think it was) 10.4.10 once on an iMac. I thought that
> 10.4.11 was the source of a software conflict I was having,
> and found that MA worked "backwards" as well as forwards, at
> least "within" OS 10.4.x.
>
> Granted, I didn't go from 10.5 "downwards" to 10.4.
>
> But I did "go backwards" within 10.4 with no complaints from
> Migration Assistant at all.

That's because Apple reserves major structural changes for major version
upgrades of Mac OS X. The mechansims used to manage user accounts and
the structure and content of the Library folder are the same between all
minor 10.4.x versions (but later minor versions may have important bug
fixes in these areas).

Migration Assistant will be able to copy from another computer running
the same major version of Mac OS X (e.g. 10.4). The minor version is not
significant (e.g. 10.4.11 vs 10.4.2).

You don't even need to do a migration in this case - you can reinstall a
fresh system via Archive & Install and then not update it as far.

You might run into some issues when going back to an earlier minor
version of Mac OS X, such as having to run older versions of
applications because the version you were using required a newer Mac OS
X. The older version of the application might not being able to handle
some files saved by the newer version.

For example, Safari 4.x requires Mac OS X 10.4.11, so you would have to
run Safari 3.x if you downgraded to 10.4.10, and it might not understand
some of the preferences, bookmarks, caches, etc. saved by Safari 4.x.

What you can't do is Migrate to an earlier major version of Mac OS X
(such as 10.5.x to 10.4.x), because Migration Assistant and other
components of 10.4.x don't know how to convert important 10.5.x data
into the form required for 10.4.x.

--
David Empson
dempson(a)actrix.gen.nz
From: JF Mezei on 18 Mar 2010 15:49
John Albert wrote:
> RE:
> "If I put a iMac G4 running 10.5 into Target Mode, can a
> iMac G5 runnning 10.4 actually use Migration Assistant with
> it?

The 10.4 Migration Assistant was written before the design of 10.5 was
completed, so there is no way for it to understand the new
structures/files in 10.5 that replaced netinfo in 10.4. So when the
10.4 software will try to read the netinfo database on the 10.5 disk, it
won't find it.
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