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blownsphinctr

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 6, 2010
16
0
My MBP was recently squished in a motorcycle accident and its hard drive and superdrive were destroyed. Is it possible to buy a new hard drive, put it in an external USB 2.0 enclosure, then install OS X on it using the discs that came with my destroyed MBP in a different Mac, then put the hard drive into the squished computer and have it use that hard drive as its startup disk? The motherboard on the squished computer is fine, I just can't install OS X on it because it has a broken superdrive.
 
The disks that came with your Macbook Pro will only allow installation from a Macbook Pro. They are "model specific" I guess you would say. Otherwise yes you would be able to do that.
 
Yes, you can do that. I had a harddrive on my Macbook Air die and I installed OSX on a USB 2.0 Drive I had for a few weeks while I got a replacement internal drive. The only problem I remember having was that the laptop would crash if I put it in sleepmode and tried to wake it up.
 
Why don't you just use an external dvd drive or the MBA's super drive ? Install the new HD and run the install.
 
If you get a Firewire HD enclosure, and a cable then you can boot up using an external HD using the Target Disk Mode feature.
 
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