How do I migrate my Powerbook to my MacBook Pro without a fire-wire cable?

I just got my new MacBook Pro and wanted to migrate my old Powerbook G4 to it. By default, this is done by connecting the two computers using a firewire cable. But my old Powerbook G4 has and old firewire port, and for the new MacBook, Apple for some reason has decided it needs a different firewire port. And now I have no firewire cable to connect the two different ports…

In the installation/migration program, Apple suggest to connect both computers to your local network using ethernet cables. But I was doing this at home and only had one ethernet cable present… Apples next suggestion is to migrate using Airport. I started doing this, but it was very slow and would take about 8 hours to complete (and my hard-disk wasn’t even that full).

I didn’t want to wait that long, so I aborted the migration and decided to create the smallest possible network, and connect the two computers directly using the ethernet cable (so without a router). And this worked! The migration now was finished in about an hour and a half.

Conclusion: If you don’t have the right fire-wire cable and want to migrate your Powerbook to your MacBook Pro, connect them directly using an ethernet cable.

Status: Tested it, works.