Got a new mac?

If you’ve bought a new Mac lately, one that ships with significantly new features like a 4 finger trackpad or otherwise is a different model. Hold your horses on cloning your Harddisk to the new computer.

Usually this should be no problem at all… Just fire up Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper… but it seems there are some “under the hood changes” that make the booting process go bad.
On various models including the Aluminum MacBook and very latest model MacBook Pro the cloning of data failed and required an Archive & Install to fix it.

On my newly bought MacBook Pro this screwed up the login password as well, the keychain somehow remained untouched.

The best guess is to either use Apple’s Migration Assistant. Which is slow and might fail at times if the system is messy or even skip things altogether. However, it converts any files to the right stuff and keeps drivers and system specific files intact.