Busted the Cat!
My cat knows better than to walk on my desk. But, because the office is so messy, that’s her preferred way to get to the window sill.
So, I’m sitting in the living room, and she comes over, so I pick her up and turn her upside down, as I’m prone to do. I notice a little piece of paper stuck to her belly. It’s the “activate this card” sticker from a credit card I just got, which I had left smack dab in the middle of my desk.
Busted!
More Migration Difficulties
I reinstalled the OS (via “Erase and Install”, removing unneeded languages, printer drivers and apps), completed the Setup Assistant without migrating. Then I allowed Software Update to run, updating to 10.4.6, and updating 9 other apps. Finally I ran Migration Assistant again, and it ran into the same problem: Apparently I have more than 60 million gigabytes of data in my home directory.
I’m currently on the phone with Apple support, but I am not hopeful that they’ll resolve this issue (update: nope).
I tried before to remove all of my movies & images, but I had left music and sources from work in there. Maybe I should remove all four of those and try again. Here goes…
My New MacBook Pro
Yesterday I picked up a shiny new 2.0 GHz MacBook Pro. The packaging was expectedly beautiful, and the thing came up immediately after I powered it on. Nicely, Apple didn’t insist that I charge it overnight before use; instead, they said to do the charge calibration steps sometime in the first week. It was 3/4 full when I got it. The beauty ended there…
I made sure it was plugged in and charging, and got started. I’d head good things about the Migration Assistant, so I opted to let Tiger migrate everything from my old PowerBook to the new one (via the Setup Assistant). I put the old one into FireWire Target Disk mode, and let it rip. After a few minutes, it had determined that there was in excess of 60,000,000 GB (yes, sixty million gigabytes) of data in my home directory to be transferred over. Unfortunately, I opted for the 100 GB hard disk (thinking that would’ve been enough), and so all the stuff on my old (80 GB) drive wouldn’t fit.
Note the computed sizes of my home directory data to move (sorry about the utterly crappy photograph). Click for a larger image.
The other unconscionable thing the Setup Assistant did was go to sleep before finishing (mind you, it was plugged in and powered). I tried again later with the Migration Assistant directly, and it had basically the same problem. I’m guessing there’s either a 32-bit int where there should be a 64-bit int, or someone forgot to swap bytes (I hate little endian, and this is one of the biggest reasons i hate Intel architecture, but since the old Mac is mounted as a drive on the new system, I doubt this is the real problem).
I’m now reformatting, reinstalling, and trying again. I’ll post again after that’s over.