Our trusty 9 year old Mac G5 hit what appears to be a dead end … the graphics card died and thus no picture, just a black screen. In desperation — because we're a busy design and education company — we purchased a brand spanking new 2014 27" iMac. Beautiful machine. That was the easy part. And we bought the necessary cables to speed the transfer of data and applications from Firewire (G5) to Thunderbolt (iMac).
Now here's the migration issue and request for help: In setting up the transfer of data from one machine to another, the procedure says to start Migration Assistant on both machines. The problem with the G5 is that the monitor is dead so there's no way to navigate to the Migration app in the Utilities folder. The Migration Assistant on the iMac therefore cannot locate the G5 and just spins endlessly.
I just learned that on older PPC Macs you could restart the machine and hold the "T" key down to force it into target mode. This may be the answer but wanted to post this in case it doesn't work and there's another solution.
Please advise and thank you in advance.
Best Answer
Target disk mode is the answer. In my experience, there's a pretty good chance it will work even if the display is dead.
If Target disk mode fails, you could easily remove the hard drive and connect it to a SATA dock and transfer that way.