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Access an ML HDD 'statically'

F

Fed

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 7, 2012
409
0
Liverpool.
The wording of the title may throw you off so allow me to explain:

My SSD should be arriving soon. As such, I've been thinking about what I should do with the original disk. I'm tempted to just leave the Mountain Lion OS on there as a kind of back-up and just install the ML from a USB straight to the SSD (rather than Ghost or whatever else).

Should I put the disk into an enclosure, or swap out the ODD to make room for it, the fact that the disk isn't encrypted means I can just 'see' the files, correct? My Macs have always been very stable and therefore I have never needed to access the OS drives in this way before. I could do with researching Mac security a little more, but I imagine it'll work like a Windows/Linux OS and allow me to see all files?

Assuming the drive is in the ODD bay, will I need extra software to pick which OS/Drive to boot? What is the default behaviour?
 
Fed said:
My SSD should be arriving soon. As such, I've been thinking about what I should do with the original disk. I'm tempted to just leave the Mountain Lion OS on there as a kind of back-up and just install the ML from a USB straight to the SSD (rather than Ghost or whatever else).
Click to expand...

I would backup and erase the HDD. No use having the OS on the drive unless you need it to be bootable. Just to save space.

Should I put the disk into an enclosure, or swap out the ODD to make room for it, the fact that the disk isn't encrypted means I can just 'see' the files, correct? My Macs have always been very stable and therefore I have never needed to access the OS drives in this way before. I could do with researching Mac security a little more, but I imagine it'll work like a Windows/Linux OS and allow me to see all files?
Click to expand...

You will just be able to read the drive normally. I can read my Mac partition in Windows via Boot Camp. You can even put your computer in Target Disk Mode and read it via another computer.

Do you need other computers to read from it? If not and you don't use the optical drive, why not give yourself some extra storage?

Assuming the drive is in the ODD bay, will I need extra software to pick which OS/Drive to boot? What is the default behaviour?
Click to expand...

No, you can select the default drive to boot from (System Preference > Startup Disk). Holding the Option/Alt key will bring up the boot menu after pressing the power button.
 
Tea-Aholic said:
.
Click to expand...

That's great and exactly what I needed to know.

I was tempted to just flatten the drive but I may just leave it as-is. Then if something happens to the SSD or I want to swap it out at some point, I don't need to reformat anything.
 
If the old HD is truly to be a disaster recovery backup then it should be outside, in an external enclosure. But if u need its space, oh well.
 
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