I visited the Apple store one weekend for other reasons, and asked them about their iMac stock, you know, since I was already there. They don’t carry the upgraded model that I wanted (no surprise) so I’d have to order it online and wait. And that’s when the fun began…

When we returned home from the Apple store that day, it’s like the Mac Pro just knew. It seemed to retaliate and refused to boot up. Nothing I tried seemed to work – just the normal startup tone and a gray screen. Eventually, after I sucked it up and ordered the iMac, I realized that it was a system drive failure.

The iMac finally arrived and I was all giddy setting up my new toy. The screen is ridiculous. I just wish it was under better circumstances – I wanted to migrate my data over to it more gracefully, and at my own leisure…

I’ve learned a number of things during the setup of my iMac. First, I already knew that my most recent data backup was not really up to date (my bad), but at least I had something. Secondly, the Library folder is hidden in OS X Lion – so it takes just a little extra effort to migrate my data over to the new machine. And third, the folder structures in Lion have changed – significantly. I can no longer do a simple folder copy from one machine to another in order to “migrate” my data. It just won’t work.

I tried the migration assistant, which worked. Kind of. Since the iMac was already setup with a user account it needed to migrate the data over to a new user account. After that, I tested copying the Mail & Calendar folders over to the original user account now that they’ve been converted to the new folder structure – but that presented with a handful of permissions issues that I need to work through. The Calendar seemed to be mostly OK after that, but Mail just wasn’t quite right and, frustrated, I left it there.

I was actually able to get the old system drive working long enough to grab my Library & a few other folders off of it – so the data backup issue is no longer an issue. Now I just need to get everything Lion-ified.

So here’s my current plan of action (because I know that everyone’s just dying to know):

1. I scavenged another drive and rebuilt the Mac Pro with 10.6 & installed all of the updates.
2. I’ve started “restoring” my Mail, Calendar, and Address Book data back to the Mac Pro in 10.6 format.
3. Once that’s confirmed OK, I need to install my older version of iPhoto, make sure the photo library is OK, then link my iTunes library to the proper location and make sure that’s OK.
4. Then, I need to install the new version of iPhoto so that it’ll update the iPhoto library database. Apparently I decided at the wrong time to upgrade iPhoto – JUST prior to the failure. It didn’t actually install due to App Store connection issues…

That will be the end of the preparation phase. After that, I can go one of two routes:

1. Upgrade the Mac Pro to Lion and migrate the data over from there.
2. Reinstall Lion on the iMac and use the Migration Assistant to hopefully grab my data and migrate it over for me from the Mac Pro.

I’m going to reinstall Lion on the iMac anyway, because at this point I’ve tinkered so much that I don’t trust it’s stability. It’s already started throwing kernel panics.

This effort better be worth it! From what I’ve seen of the iMac and Lion so far, I think I’ll ultimately be pretty happy. If I can ever finish getting it setup.

Meanwhile, I decided to reinstall OS X on my iMac because it’s been acting weird and it fails on checking file permissions. I backed everything up and took my time. Once I had formatted and reinstalled OS X, I realized that I had forgotten to backup my photos. Anything after June (with the exception of the photos from Spain – thank god) is gone. =(

For some reason, my email client on my Mac stopped letting me send emails from my elorg.net email addresses. I’ll have to investigate that – but it’s been happening for about a month? If you’ve sent an email to that address and haven’t gotten a reply back, that’s why. The replies are probably sitting in my outbox, complaining that it can’t send.

Sorry. I’ll post another update when I figured that one out.

I was going to try to fix my photo gallery, but it’s very demotivating to think about how many photos I already had imported, and all of the time I spent on organizing it, sorting through photos, and all of the visitor comments that were posted – all of which I lost during “the Great Data Loss from Ace-Host”. I was debating sticking with the phpGallery script that I’ve been using for a few years now, but now I’m tempted to go with something a bit more clean, simple, etc. – like Lussumo’s filebrowser.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

The down side to filebrowser is that I don’t think visitors can post comments. Though that’s not always a bad thing…

One more thing – I finally updated my webcam pic. I got my hair cut a little over a month ago. I cut almost all of it off. I was trying to see how long I could go without cutting my hair until I couldn’t take it any longer…