I am one of the unfortunate owners of a 2011 MBP with failed GPU. I'm thinking of possibly getting a refurb 2012 MBP (non retina). Would it be possible for me to take the hard drive from my 2011 MBP and stick it into a 2012 MBP and have it work? The hard drive on my 2011 MBP actually has a Boot Camp setup with both OS X Lion and Windows 7, so would both of them work fine if I move the hard drive into a 2012 MBP?
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Can I put a MBP hard drive into a different MBP?
- Thread starter slapple
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ecschwarz
macrumors 65816
Yep - it's the same 2.5" SATA drive - you could even use an external SATA-to-USB adapter to access the drive if you don't want to start tinkering inside of your new machine. I use one of these for numerous things and it was pretty cheap (about $25): http://www.ianker.com/product/68UPSATAA-02BU
As far as Boot Camp and Lion, the Mid-2012 models that originally came with Mountain Lion may not be able to boot into Lion - I haven't really messed with that, but I know mine won't use my Lion boot disc that has worked on every older Mac that I've tried. In that case, you may just update to 10.9 unless you have a particular software reason for keeping you with 10.7. I haven't dealt much with the intricacies of Windows being grouchy on a different machine than it was originally installed on, but I'm guessing you'd at least have to go get the newest Boot Camp drivers (Boot Camp Assistant can download them and put them on a flash drive) for you to use any newer technologies (such as a more recent Intel chipset).
As far as Boot Camp and Lion, the Mid-2012 models that originally came with Mountain Lion may not be able to boot into Lion - I haven't really messed with that, but I know mine won't use my Lion boot disc that has worked on every older Mac that I've tried. In that case, you may just update to 10.9 unless you have a particular software reason for keeping you with 10.7. I haven't dealt much with the intricacies of Windows being grouchy on a different machine than it was originally installed on, but I'm guessing you'd at least have to go get the newest Boot Camp drivers (Boot Camp Assistant can download them and put them on a flash drive) for you to use any newer technologies (such as a more recent Intel chipset).
I know Mavericks works fine coming from a 2011 15" MBP (Quad 2.2 Core i7 Sandy Bridge)) to a 2012 13" MBP (Dual 2.9Ghz i7 Ivy Bridge).