Hard Drive replacement questions
Okay, I've decided to upgrade my G3 iMac with a new Western Digital 80GB hard drive. But I have a couple of questions:
1. The drive is listed as EIDE. Is this backward compatible with the ATA requirements in my G3 iMac 400Mhz? I've tried to learn what all the ATA standards mean, but it's pretty confusing.
2. When I back up my current drive to an external drive, can I simply dump everything including my system folder onto the new drive after I've formatted it? I use O/S 9.2.2 but my startup disk is only O/S 9. Or do I have to go through the steps of upgrading 9 to 9.1 to 9.2 and then re-install my applications one by one? In other words, if I dump all my folders (including the system folder) onto the new drive, will it properly overwrite everything, along with all extensions, and will my Mac be smart enough to read that without any problems?
I know, I probably sound very ignorant, but I just want to make sure I do things correctly beforehand. Thanks for your help! Everyone has been so great on the last two questions I had.
GTSC
1. The drive is listed as EIDE. Is this backward compatible with the ATA requirements in my G3 iMac 400Mhz? I've tried to learn what all the ATA standards mean, but it's pretty confusing.
2. When I back up my current drive to an external drive, can I simply dump everything including my system folder onto the new drive after I've formatted it? I use O/S 9.2.2 but my startup disk is only O/S 9. Or do I have to go through the steps of upgrading 9 to 9.1 to 9.2 and then re-install my applications one by one? In other words, if I dump all my folders (including the system folder) onto the new drive, will it properly overwrite everything, along with all extensions, and will my Mac be smart enough to read that without any problems?
I know, I probably sound very ignorant, but I just want to make sure I do things correctly beforehand. Thanks for your help! Everyone has been so great on the last two questions I had.
GTSC
Comments
I'm having a hard time understanding the second question... but here's my take on OS 9. Unlike OS X, with OS 9 you can just copy everything on the drive and it'll work like before. Copy the contents of your iMac's current drive to an external one (better yet, just put the new 80 GB temporarily in the external case) and just make sure you get the new 80 GB drive to contain all the same data as the previous internal drive.
If you can't put the 80 GB into the external case, and you have to use your external drive as a go-between, then you'd have to boot from the external drive to get the iMac to start up. Copy everything over, disconnect the external drive and you should be good to go. Nothing will be overwritten as long as there are no duplicate names. If you copy your system folder and your external drive already has a system folder, then name the newer (backup) copy something like "Backup System Folder" so you know which is which.
Hope this helps.