MS Office 2004 rendered inoperative and I've got a TON of stuff I use with it! Here's what to do!

A MacValley member brought me back to Earth with their problem. A problem that many people will face as they finally upgrade from 10.6.8 to 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10. They have a machine that runs 10.6.8 now and they want to upgrade to a recent version of OS X.

The problem is this: They’ve got programs and stuff based on the old PowerPC CPU. In today’s case, it was their treasured Office 2004. Oh, no, they can’t access spreadsheets!

The answer is simple: Backup your existing partition, then download and install LibreOffice 4. Then upgrade to OS X 10.8 or 10.9.

You will need three items.

An external hard drive partition with enough space to back up the main hard drive. If you don’t have a hard drive handy, you can buy a USB hard drive with 1 TB capacity for under $100 at Frys or Costco or Best Buy. 

A program to clone your existing hard drive. I suggest Super-Duper, because it’s FREE if you just want to back up the whole drive after wiping out the target drive. It’s $27.95 if you want the additional features. I recommend you get it. 

If you have Carbon Copy Cloner or another cloning program, that will work just as well. But you need to clone your hard drive.So get to work.

The third part of this equation is for you to download and install LibreOffice 4. It’s a free program, but donations are welcome. 

LibreOffice 4 comes from an international effort, headquartered in Germany, to develop an alternative to MS Office. They have versions for Windows and Linux, too. In fact, most Linux distributions include LibreOffice as part of their installation. 

Back to the Problem at Hand

“I don’t see any USB 2.0 drives or Firewire 400 drives on the shelves. What do I do?” 

I’m assuming you see lots of USB 3.0 drives. Don’t worry, USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0. Just plug the USB 3.0 cable into your Mac’s USB 2.0 ports. It won’t run as fast as USB 3.0, but at the slower USB 2.0 speed. 

If you want to buy a Firewire hard drive, you’ll probably find Firewire 800 hard drives on the shelves. Don’t worry, if you get an adaptor cable for Firewire 800 to Firewire 400, they’ll work just fine. You’ll find the cables at Frys. 

“What’s involved in cloning a hard drive? Why can’t I just drag and drop from my old drive to my new drive?"

Unfortunately, turning a new empty drive into the bootable clone of your current drive is more complicated than just dragging and dropping folders. You have to set up disk and folder permissions, which gets complicated. Best to let a cloning program do it for you. 

I recommend Super-Duper because I know it works and for the purposes of this article, it’s free to use. Comments are welcome regarding other cloning programs. But I’m going to show you how to use Super-Duper.

Installing Super-Duper is simple. First, you go to their Web site, Shirt-Pocket Software and download the .dmg file. I assume you use OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, so you can use the latest version of Super-Duper, 2.7.2.

Double-click on the Super-Duper! .dmg file. You’ll see this screen pop up

 

 

This is a license agreement. Essentially it means that if you’d like to use any of Bruce B. Lacey’s computer code in your own program, you have to ask him first, Politely. Otherwise, he can sue your pants off and win.

If you just plan to use Super-Duper! to clone your hard drive and do not want to infringe on Mr. Lacey’s intellectual property, then click on the “Agree” button. 

This brings you to the second window, which shows the Super-Duper! app, the introductory ReadMe document which you read with TextEdit, and a link to the full Super-Duper! manual in PDF format. Mr. Lacey has a copy within the program for your reference. Just go to the Help menu. 

 

 

 To install Super-Duper!, follow the simple instructions. Drag it to the Applications folder and run!

 

Running Super-Duper!

 

 

 

 You want to set up Super-Duper so that the screen looks like this:

For “Copy” select your main Macintosh hard drive, probably called Macintosh HD. You want to clone this drive onto —> the 
“To” drive, which  is the drive you bought for this purpose. 

You want to set up the “Options” so that the drive fixes your disk permissions on your Macintosh HD before you start cloning. 

 

 

After you finish cloning, you want to set up the end game. Do you want the Mac to shut down? Do you want to boot from the newly cloned drive? You have several choices.

 

 

How do I change from my Macintosh drive to this external “My Clone” drive? 

 

You have two ways to change between the drives or partitions you start from:

The easiest way for you to change drives is to use the Startup Disk system preference in your System Preferences

 

 

 

 

 Just go to Startup Disk and select the Startup Disk you want. I have a lot of startup disks that I can use with my Mac.

(No, I can’t boot up on my current Mac with 10.5.8 and 10.4.11. I use those partitions with my old 2006 MacBook)

 

 

The second method is to restart your Mac and hold down the Option key. You’ll see a display of all the bootable drives attached to it, including the otherwise hidden Restore partition. 

And one of those drives would be your “My Clone” drive after you’ve completed formatting it and cloning it.  

 

 

 

Now a word of warning!.

 

 The drive you bought at Frys or Costco or Best Buy is usually formatted to use with a Windows machine. 

Your Macintosh can read this drive, but it can’t write to it.  Note the red oval at the bottom. You can only read from this drive.  You need to reformat it after you copy any information on it to your Mac.

Reformatting a Windows formatted external hard drive for your Macintosh

 

 To format your external hard drive, you use Disk Utility. Here is my latest acquisition, a 1.5 Tb Seagate hard drive which I will show you how to format for use in cloning your Mac hard drive.

 

 

The format is MS-DOS (FAT32) and if you look at the very bottom on the right, you’ll see the Partition Map Scheme is Master Boot Record (MBR). 

Now Disk Utility says this partition can’t be modified. But I’ll show you how to modify it; change the Snow Leopard’s spots to Maverick’s waves.

For this demonstration, I’ll assume you just want the whole disk available to you. No second or third partitions to complicate matters. 

So you’ll get a 1.5 TB drive in Mac HFS+ format and with a GUID Partition Map Scheme from a Windows formatted drive.

 

Step 1. Change the partitions!

To modify the layout, or partitions, of the hard drive, go to the double-head arrow at the right-hand edge of the box that says, “Partition Layout”. You’re going to change from the current layout to another one. You can choose from 1 to 16 partitions

In this case, you’ll go from the current, 1 partition layout, to a new 1 partition layout. Simple, isn’t it? You simply have to say, “I’m changing everything by using the exact same partition scheme as was previously used."

 

 

What have you changed by going from the Current partition scheme to the new 1 partition scheme? You have changed the name of the partition from “Windows” to “Untitled 1"

 

 

And you have opened the door for changes to the hard disk format and partition map scheme.

 

Change the Partition Map Scheme!

 

 

Don’t forget to change the Partition Map Scheme under “Options” 

“Options” is a button just below the partition map display. Click on it and you’ll see the following.

 

 

 

 Note that you have three choices. Right now, your Windows hard drive is set at Master Boot Record, the MS-DOS/NTFS standard. You don’t want that! You want GUID so that you can start up an Intel-based Mac.

 

Click on the OK button and you’ve set the correct partition map scheme for OS X.

But you still haven’t set the disk format yet. So let’s go to the Format Line.

 

 

Hmm, it’s still at MS-DOS (FAT). You need to change this. Click on the double-headed arrow at the right-end side.

 

 

 You see that MS-DOS (FAT) is checked off. You want to click on the top selection, which is Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Almost there! Now just add a name to your drive, such as “My Clone”, hit the Apply button (highlighted at the lower right-hand corner) and your drive will be prepared for you.

 

 You can clone your Mac’s internal hard drive to the external hard drive. 

 So go back to the instructions on using Super-Duper!, clone your hard drive, and fix dinner. Cloning a drive takes some time.

 

 

My next piece will introduce LibreOffice 4 to you. It’s your substitute for MS Office 2004 for the time being. 

 

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog