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TICKET ARCHIVE -> iMac G4 - iPhoto & iTunes not working

galaxie500 - Dec 6, 2006 - 1:52 pm

My father's venerable G3 IMac is grinding to a halt with the Tiger OS so I've bought him a late model G4 iMac with 17" screen and upgraded the memory to 768Mb. Its a 1.25KHz processor.
I connected the 2 machines together with Firewire and summoned the Migration Asssitant which took me through the various Applications and Folders I wanted to move to the new machine, including iPhoto and iTunes. Neither had an enormous amount of data within but on finishing the transfer, neither application could display their data - there was no music in iTunes and iPhoto had a gallery of rectangles and squares but no photos.

What has happened here? It appears there are music files in Finder - Music and there are Photos in Finder - Pictures but if I drag them directly into their respective open applications a message tells me the data is unreadable.

I've been very impressed with macosX.com forum in the past - help please! My Father returns from vacation on Friday and he will be blown away by the new G4 iMac but less impressed by his lack of iPhoto and iTunes!

Many thanks

galaxie500

galaxie500 - Dec 7, 2006 - 11:11 am

It appears I've cleared up the problem! I updated Quicktime and iPhoto and iTunes returned with their respective files intact I don't understand why but there you are!
If you've any comments I'd be pleased to know more about this miraculous restoration. Thanks

galaxie500

ishan - Dec 8, 2006 - 3:39 am

This may have been caused by a few things:

1. Different versions of iPhoto on the two computers. The library structures have changed between different iPhoto versions and the photos from an older version have to be converted to a newer version.

2. Differences between different versions of iTunes on the two computers.
3. Failure to deauthorize/authorize purchased music on iTunes before transfer

The Migration Assistant isn't perfect, and your father may still note some odd behavior with preference files, etc. left over from the G3 that were migrated to the G4. It would be a good idea to use an utility like Yasu (or Maintain, Onyx, Cocktail...but Yasu is free) to delete all your system and user caches, font caches, etc. They will be recreated on the next startup. The next startup may take a long time as a consequence, so do it before your father gets back

Hope that helps and please let us know what happens. Thanks.

galaxie500 - Dec 8, 2006 - 4:26 am

Thanks again guys and gals!
As I stated, the G4 is now up and running with all its faculties intact I think. It does seem that Quicktime was the lynch pin although I can't be sure that was the only thing that did the trick. The only fly in the ointment is the Bluetooth keyboard I bought him. The G4 iMac I purchased doesn't have Bluetooth so I bought a bluetooth dongle and seemed to successfully set up the keyboard. However, when putting the computer to sleep and re-awakening, the keyboard connection is lost. No matter what I do in Bluetooth Set up, the keyboard is no longer able to connect with the iMac. If I pull the Dongle from the computer however, the keyboard 'sees' the iMac again! My ol' Dad won't want to do that every time he uses the machine so any ideas??
Thanks again for the speedy response to my earlier query - nearly there!

galaxie500

ishan - Dec 10, 2006 - 4:23 am

This is very dependent on which Bluetooth dongle you've bought. You may want to check the Apple discussion boards regarding third party Bluetooth dongles which are more reliable than others. Also, Bluetooth keyboards, although nice because they're wireless share the problem of batteries dying. This could be frustrating to your father. Why not give him a high quality wired keyboard instead?

P.S. I have three wireless bluetooth keyboards sitting unused. This is because, if you want to start up in Safe Mode or have to use keypresses on startup, it won't work with a Bluetooth keyboard, since the keyboard drivers haven't loaded that early in startup. So, for troubleshooting, a Bluetooth keyboard is a pain in the neck.

galaxie500 - Dec 10, 2006 - 5:52 am

Wise words - I've given him a wired Apple keyboard for now and he seems very happy!

Thanks for your quick response as ever - what a wonderful resource you are.

galaxie 500