Hard drive Swap ~ Will it work?

[kinsale]

I currently have an old white Macbook (1.83GHz) that I recently put a new 7200 rpm 500GB hard drive in. It has Snow Leopard on it.

I am buying today a new 13 inch Macbook Pro with a 250GB 5400rpm drive.

My question is can I simply swap the drives and everything will work or will I need to reformat one or both and re install the OS.

thanks

 

[Hellhammer]

You can always try but because they have different components thus different drivers, it might not work

 

[spinnerlys]

You can swap the drives, but the 500GB HDD with an older Mac OS X version on it (?) might not work with the MBP. If it works, be sure to update both Macs to have the latest drivers.

 

[kinsale]

Both drives have Snow Leopard.

 

[Gator24765]

i was wondering the same thing.

 

[CSHawkeye81]

It should work, but have you filled up that 500gb drive yet? If not have you thought of using the 250gb to do time machine and then a clean install on that drive??

 

[Gomff]

There's a pretty good chance that it will work. When my Macbook Pro developed a logic board fault I was able to boot to the system that was installed on it from another Mac via a firewire cable, and was hence able to get my files off it and whatnot before sending it in for repair. I've l also had success booting from system backups made on different systems with Superduper so I think it will probably work.

Put it this way, there's no harm trying, biggest risk is probably getting the hard drive out of the old macbook.