Is Tiger (10.4) Too Old?

I’m not talking about the golfer this week…several times in the past couple of weeks I have been asked to extricate customers from a precarious position. After purchasing a new computer, they were unable to perform migration from their old computer, running Tiger (10.4.x) to their new machine running Mountain Lion (10.8.x). Previously, it was necessary for machines running Tiger to be fully updated, running 10.4.11, because it included a Migration Assistant update for use over a network.

A recent customer’s Tiger machine, fully updated and in target disk mode, did not appear as available sources in Migration Assistant, however. To resolve this, I thought I’d create a ‘test’ account on the new machine and attempt the migration again. After creating the test User account and logging in, the Tiger-based machine did show up as an external HD plugged into the new computer. When the Migration Assistant app was launched though, no previous volume is detected. While there is nothing in writing in Apple’s knowledge base, I’m guessing that perhaps Tiger is unsupported completely at this time for migration.

One thing you can do is to move a manual copy of the User folder(s) from the old computer to Users on the Mountain Lion unit. After copying the folder over, you need but to create a User account in System Preferences with the same short name as the folder. The machine will ask if you want to use that folder for the new account, to which you need to reply ‘Yes.’

In doing the transfer through this method though, I have come across a disturbing trend: Address Book and iCal lose their content. This conundrum still irks me and I have yet to find a solution, either in blogs or from Apple proper to resolve the issue. I assume that, in this case, upgrading the old machine to Leopard (10.5.x) or Snow Leopard (10.6.x) may produce a different outcome.