HI, I purchased a late 2008 macbook unibody (silver) and also have a 2006 macbook. I upgraded the hdd on the 2006 macbook and also partitioned the harddrive and installed windows on it using boot camp. My question is this, is it possible to just swap the hdd out and have it work? Im pretty sure it might not be so my next question would be if there is a way I can copy the whole image on the hdd so that when I install it on my unibody macbook I can just restore? I hope my making sense here, I just dont want to go through the pain of having to reinstall everything. Thanks for the help.
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How to transfer an existing hdd from one macbook to another macbook
- Thread starter dcjose20
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You want to transfer the HDD in the 2006 MacBook into the unibody model? Not possible since there will be driver issues. Not to mention other software problems that will arise due to the sudden hardware change.
Yes, I was afraid that would be the case. So im stuck having to reinstall everything then? Oh well. My biggest concern was finding another copy of windows I could use thats why I was asking. Also, I am planning on upgrading the memory to 8gb since ive read on other threads here that it is possible. Will snow leopard recognize the full 8gb?
Upgrading to 8GB is possible as long as your MacBook has the correct EFI Firmware update in place. What you could do is slave the drive and place it in the Optical Bay drive. That way you can recover files from it directly and faster. Not only that, but perhaps you can allow Windows to boot from it after having done the proper driver updates (these can be done via Safe Mode with Networking).
Sounds good but not quite sure how I would go about doing that exactly. I can prob get another copy of windows so its not that big of a deal. Also, if I plan on using the cd drive then there wouldnt me room to have the extra hdd correct?
True, but the swaping out the optical drive is a decision that should be weighed depending on your needs.
If you can get another copy of Windows, then yes it makes sense to start from scratch.
True, thanks for the quick responses. One more question for you, I see you have the same model as me, is upgrading to mountain lion worth it?
Depends. My Mac is slow right now because the RAM i have is not enough for all I do plus system resources needed. However, I do plan on upgrading tho which will make things much smoother.
I think it should run fine with 8GB then. I just have to look for a good deal on ram.
???
You can change hard drives between any two Macs (provided they both support the OS in question). Hell, you can even for example take a 13'' MBP hard drive, clone it, install a bootloader on the cloned one and run a Hackintosh (the only thing you have to install are the drivers for stuff Apple doesn't support, like Hackintosh network cards or NVIDIA graphics). I have been changing hard drives between MB 3,1, MBP 5,5 and MBP 7,1 without issues for years.
The drivers are all present in System/Library/Extensions of every OS X installation, for all Apple supported hardware.