OS X :: Swapping Hard Drives Between Two Mac's
Aug 23, 2009
I have a 15" MBP with 256ssd installed and a 13" MBP with a 250gb 5400 drive. I prefer to use the 13" as my main computer and want to take the 256ssd drive from the 15" and put it in the 13". Then take the 250gb drive from the 13" and put it in the 15" How hard is this to do? I've not done something like this before. Since I'm swapping an ssd with a regular hd is it as easy as following the instructions on this forum, remove the screws and swap the drives? After that's done I'll need to overwrite the 15" software and load the OS and drivers for the 13" on to the ssd drive. Is that as simple as taking the restore disk for the 13" put it in the drive and reinstall the OS? Or, should I just take it to the local authorized Apple Dealer and have them do it? (We don't have an Apple store nearby.
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Jan 25, 2009
I have a Imac 20 with a small 3.5 hard drive and I have bought a bigger 360 gig 3.5 hard drive to replace the old one. I have the new one in an external case with USB 2.0 right now. Is there some way I can transfer the entire contents of the old hard drive on to the new one and then swap out the old drive with the new drive and not miss a beat?
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Sep 2, 2010
i have two exact same 17 inch MBPs i am thinking on selling one , one has a lot of stickers and marks on it and the data on that is not at all important (i can format the hard drive no problem). the other one body has very clean and data on that is important lots and lots of photos and videos. i want to sell the one which has clean body so i can get better $ for it. it is possible to just swap hard drives between these two identical MBPs and sell ? would that make any different in performance and also the serial number on ABOUT THIS MAC is that written on hard drive or some place else?
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Jan 12, 2011
I have a older mac mini and a 6 month old macbook pro, the mini's hard drive is full, can I take the one from the mbp, wipe it, and put it in the mini and get a larger one for the mbp? If so are there any recommendations for a HD larger then 500GB for my mbp?
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Jun 21, 2012
I have a 1tb, 5,400rpm harddrive on my old laptop (mid 2009) and wish to transfer it for the one in my new 15" Macbook Pro, 750gb 5,400.(Mid 2012)
What steps are needed to make this successful?
Info:
MacBook
Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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Apr 12, 2012
I would like to always have one external hard drive attached to my iMac for Time Machine backups, and another external hard drive off site - periodically swapping the two. The though is that if there is fire or theft, it won't help to have a hard drive onsite attached to the computer, because both the iMac and the hard drive could be lost. Is Time Machine smart enough to allow me to configure two drives, so that whenever I plug in one of the drives, it can figure out what needs to be backed up?
Info:
27' iMac i7 Quad-Core, Mac OS X (10.6.2)
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May 31, 2010
I just got a mac mini and was wondering if it's possible to just take the hard drive out of my macbook and install it in the mac mini and then boot up. Will it work? Or do I have to set it all up again? The reason I want to do this is because the mac mini has a 320 GB HD and my macbook 500GB, so I want the bigger drive in the mac mini. But, I don't have a "transitional" hard drive to throw everything onto before I wipe the macbook hard drive and install it in the mac mini.
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Oct 12, 2009
I'm thinking about purchasing a used MacBook Pro that has a bad DVD drive. I have a PowerBook G4 that the logic board went out on and I was thinking I could put my PowerBook drive in the MacBook. Does anyone know if this will work? The look so similar, but I'm not sure.
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May 4, 2010
I know the hard drives are swappable between computers (providing it has the same interface). My question though relates to formatted OS drives however. I have two Mac Pro's (MacPro1,1 and MacPro3,1). Can I swap the drives between them without losing software or reformatting? The reason I ask is with Windows, it seems to build the system around a specific motherboard configuration. Were you to replace the motherboard in that system, Windows will crash on bootup due to different kernel level drivers on the hard drive.
The reason I'm asking is because I like the way I have everything setup on my MacPro1,1, but want to get the speed boost from the MacPro3,1. Will this work or will I require a clean format of both drives when I swap them.
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Sep 18, 2009
Been trying to figure this one out, but can't seem to find a clearcut answer. Here's the dilemma: My 2 1/2 year old MP got replaced under AppleCare by my local Apple store with a new Nehalem MP when they couldn't fix it. The 3 user installed drives in my old MP were good, so they moved them from my old MP to my new one. One of those was the boot drive in my old MP, so the Apple store tech made it the boot drive in my new one. I had the drives arranged in order on my old MP (being the anal engineer that I am), however now my old boot drive is in bay 4, the newer MP boot drive is in bay 2, etc., i.e. all mixed up. Being that the old drives were almost 3 years old I decided to clone my old boot drive to the newer one and make it the startup drive, assuming that it being newer it would be more reliable long term. That all went fine.
Now I know that the OS doesn't care in which bay what drive is but does Time Machine? If I swap around the bays to put my boot drive into bay 1 from bay 2 will that confuse Time Machine and make it backup everything again, i.e. wasting backup space??? I.e., does TM go off of physical name and location or does it go off of logical name?? I know it doesn't matter which drive is where, but I just like having things in a certain order to troubleshooting purposes just in case.
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Sep 22, 2010
I added a second harddrive to my Mac Pro. As it happens, it is larger than the primary harddrive. What I would like to do is use the larger harddrive as my Mac OS disk, while using boot camp to set the smaller one up with windows. when I set up the larger one with 10.6, do I have to use the install disks, or can I just copy all of the files from the old disk to the new? Are there any hidden files that I need that might get left behind?
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Jun 23, 2008
Sometime I plug and unplug hard drives of my PC while it is on. Will there be a problem to do that on the Mac Pro? If the computer supports this, do I need an internal drive that is also hot-swappable in order to be safe?
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Apr 28, 2012
Is there a way to safely loosen the screws on the bracket holding the hard drive in place on a mac book pro 17 inch? I've got one loose, but the other one simply won't budge and the head is starting to strip. the amount of downward force I'm having to exert to try to get it to move seems excessive to the point of dangerous to me. i'm using a Philips 00 screwdriver which is the correct tool, I believe, but I just cannot shift it. given that Apple say this is a user replaceable part, there must be an easy wy to do it, but all I can see me doing is more damage and being stuck with a captive screw that no one can move.
Info:
iPodclassic
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Jun 24, 2012
Can I put my macbbook hard drive in a new to me used Macbook Pro, both running SL and have the Pro work like the MB? Don't want to migrate, etc.
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Mar 14, 2009
If I swap my hard drive from an old macbook (with ilife 08) into a new macbook, can I use the new macbook's OS discs to upgrade to ilife 09?
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Apr 18, 2009
After some messing about on my computer (short story:inf loop, loop writes to container in memory), I've built up large chunks of swap space on my computer. The problem isn't space that's been used up, rather the locking up of the system when switching to another application. Since the hard drive IO is flooded by calls, and that the swap space is invariably fragmented across the entire drive (iDefrag currently shows 2 1GB swapfiles: 984 and 3873 pieces).
When I went back to working in Numbers (1 400kb document open), I got a beachball for about 5-6 minutes while the app was being read back into memory from the thousands of bits on my hard drive. Now, as my thread topic suggests: is there a way to dedicate a portion of the drive (preferably not a partition) of contiguous space only for swap space usage? Googling turned up a few *nix related methods, but the link below has a stack of comments titled 'stupid idea'. Can anyone break down the method (and why they think it's a stupid idea) in the link below?
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...11226102423514
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Apr 21, 2009
I have a 13" MacBook, and I'm swapping out the factory-installed 120 GB hard drive for a 320 GB one. I have been using it with the 120 GB disk, and I want to make a copy of it on the larger disk before I swap them. I have a fairly good idea of what to do, but I don't want to risk losing data, so I want to check and see what the best way to do this would be.Here's what I was thinking: along with the new drive, I bought an external enclosure. So, I was going to put the new disk in there, connect it to the computer with the original disk, and copy a clone of the internal disk to it. I was thinking of using Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner to do this (although I have never done that, so I'd appreciate it if you could walk me through making a bootable clone with either one). Then, once I essentially have two disks which are clones, I'll swap out the old disk for the new one (I know how to do the physical installation).
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Sep 13, 2009
I'm looking at the specs page for the MacBook Pro and it reads this...
Your MacBook Pro comes standard with a 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive. Choose a hard drive with a faster speed for greater performance. Or you can choose a solid-state drive that offers enhanced durability.
Basically suggesting that the HDD option has a performance advantage over the SSD, but is this the case? I always thought SSDs could read & write quicker because they use solid-state flash memory as opposed to hard disks.
I want to go with the 256GB SSD but I want to know how it ranks in speed.
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Nov 28, 2009
I just purchased a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 640GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive to replace my stock 120GB HD. I am really excited to have the extra space. I purchased this MBP a few months ago and would like to do a fresh install of Leopard. I have an external hard drive that I have not used yet and was wondering of the best way to install Leopard on the hard drive and then add my itunes library and iphoto library to the fresh 640gb hard drive. What kind of score do you imagine I will have once I upgrade the hard drive and bump the Ram to 4GB.
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Sep 8, 2014
I have a 2011 macbook that has a motherboard that is broken, and that macbook has a terabyte Hard drive that was put in about a year ago after a broken hard drive was removed. Now I have bought a brand new macbook same model and I was advised by the apple store to take the old TB hard drive and swap it with the one in the new computer. I just want to know if by doing this I'm going to loose all of my files and programs by just swapping them. I have no back up anywhere just the files on the hard drive in the broken computer. So am I going to loose all of the files on the hard drive when I swap it? or will I have to get it backed up some how? They are both running Mavericks
Info:
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
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Apr 30, 2012
If you want to do modify or upgrade a Macbook you Should first back up your music, documents, photos etc to an external hard drive. That much I did know. And lucky for me because a few later I spilt wine on the keyboard. (Computers are not wine oriented). Lucky for me it was saved by a Mac expert. The iTunes library which also includes non-Apple purchases is sitting in an external LaCie 1tb Rugged external hard drive. And what I want to do is transfer/import the iTune library Back into the Macbook. Sure it probably sounds easy to a vetran computer person or even to someone who grew up with computers but to me it's like speaking Cantonese.
Info:
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Sep 5, 2010
I have to hard drives in my powermac. And I am running out of space with the one that has the OS on it.
I want to make the 2 internal hard drives i have appear as one so i can still install and use things that say "must have mac OS installed on this drive to use" or whatever.
i've heard of people using RAID to join them, but i want details on how i could do this.
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Oct 20, 2006
My brother's iBook G4 (800Mhz, First Rev) has completely splattered itself and we're getting a new Macbook for him under insurance. My iBook G3 (White, 900Mhz G3..the last G3 Rev of the iBook) has a failing hard drive.
Now, could I swap out those two drives, at least to recover stuff? And is there a specific method of opening up the iBook G4 so that I don't break stuff (I've already messed with my G3..and ended up with a dozen extra screws ^_^
Mainly the aim is to salvage the hard drive and swap them out; replacing my faulty iBook G3 one with the iBook G4 one which is perfectly fine.
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Sep 22, 2010
I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable than myself can help me out. I have a 2006 Intel-based Mac Pro:
Processor: Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors
Ram: 6GB (two 512MB) of 667MHz DDR2 ECC fully buffered DIMM
HDD Bay 1: 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s; 7200 rpm; 8MB cache
OSX: Tiger
I need to upgrade to Snow Leopard to be able to use newer Leopard & above only versions of software ie FCP, Aperature, etc.
The issue is that I would like to keep the Tiger OSX as I run Pro Tools LE 7 on it. Upgrading to Snow Leopard would render Pro Tools LE 7 incompatible and I would have to buy it again.
So here's what I'm thinking. I would like to install a secondary HDD in Bay 2 and install Snow Leopard on it.
Is it possible to have OSX Tiger on the HDD in Bay 1 and have OSX Snow Leopard on the HDD Bay 2? Could they each be a different startup to be selected via System Preferences or at bootup? I would only want to run one OS at any given time.
If so what would be a workflow for installing the 2nd HDD and setting it up with OSX Snow Leopard.
Also, compatible hard drives for the 2006 Intel Mac Pros seem to be harder to find now. I called Apple and they no longer sell any compatible internal HDDs.
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Feb 13, 2009
I'm planning on getting a Mac Pro with multiple hard drives and was thinking about having a main drive for Leopard and documents, one for music, one for video and another for Windows. I was just curious to see how others have theirs set up and any if there is advice to be shared.
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Nov 25, 2010
Got imac G5 just want to know two things .
1 - how many hard drives can you fit into a imac g5 or one of the new imacs.
2- if i want to put a bigger hard drive in can i just put a normal sata one in that you would buy for a pc
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Jun 1, 2008
I would have thought, given the pace of innovation, that we might have had hard drives larger than 1 TB by now. Has anyone heard of any potential rumors?
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Jan 17, 2009
Can the Mac Pro take any type of SATA HD or is it restricted to "special" types?
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Feb 22, 2009
Looking at Seagate site, even newegg, the hard drives for mac are incredibly more expensive. I doubt the interface is different, so the only other option is how it is formatted.
If the drive is formatted differently, at an extra cost, I am curious if OSX is capable of formatting externals on its own? Can I buy a standard drive and format it natively in OSX?
I only ask, because after coming from Home Premium, several hardware utilities are non-existent.
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May 27, 2009
I have a 320GB hdd, and a 1 TB hdd, what's the "biggest" single hdd you can get? is it 2TB? (internal hdd)
My other question is, can I swap content from the 320 to the 1TB, so the 1TB is the primary hdd?
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