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HD Swap - Will This Work?

M

matthewr

macrumors member
Original poster
I'm revamping my 3 year old 15 inch G4 Powerbook in the hopes of getting a year or two more out of it before replacement. In addition to a new battery, I'm going to put in a 160 GB hard drive. I was originally planning on moving the 80 GB to an enclosure to use for storage, but then I had another idea: can I move the 80 GB drive to my G3 Pismo and use it as is? The Pismo HD died a few months back, so it is currently sitting collecting dust.

I think the drive itself should work, but will it boot on a G3 straight after I pull it out of the G4? In other words, is the system software on the 80 GB going to be G4 specific, or will it work on the Pismo? It would be sweet to have a clone of the G4 (with my iTunes library and iPhoto library and all my apps) running on the G3 without having to do a reinstall...

Let me know if you think it will work or not.
 
I don't think you can move an OS from one system to another. There's alot of low-level driver type things that won't jive from 2 totally different systems and chipsets.

You might be able to partition it and install an OS, and then get your itunes and pictures off the other drive. There's no reason you should lose anything you had, you just have to juggle the data while you install an OS on the pismo.
 
Actually, moving a hard drive from one computer to another should be no problem, since OS X is for Macs only, and has all Mac drivers installed already. The only driver problem you may encounter would be if you had a third party wireless PC Card that didn't have OS X drivers, but you can install those later.

I've moved hard drives from to an iMac G3 from a PowerMac G4, since my iMac didn't have a DVD drive, and the FireWire port was goofy, and had no problems booting right into Tiger.

All pre-2006 Apple laptops use a 2.5" ATA drive, so you should run into no(t many) problems: post your experience here!
 
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