How to clone an OS from one computer to another

[Giuanniello]

Long story short,

I have to old Mini 2.1, one with 10.6.x and another with 10.7.5, I want to give one of the two to my son but would like to upgrade it to 10.7.5, the procedure is complicated, modify the installer bla bla bla so I thought I might just clone the most recent disk content onto the other, I tried with an old version of CCC but couldn't start up the older machine with the USB stick I backed up on so I was wondering if there is an easy way to perform the operation, maybe in Target mode, I will be glad to read your suggestions.

Thank you

 

[jbarley]

Target Disk mode would be my first choice. Firstly you'll need 2GB ram for 10.7.5.
Connect the 2 systems with a FW cable, start the 10.6 system in TDM (press the "T" key) and start the 10.7 mode normally.
You could use Disk Utility on the 10.7 system to erase the 10.6 HDD before cloning but not really necessary, then run CCC on the 10.7 system as the source and select the 10.6 system as the target.
That should do it...
PS: Before you try cloning...
as a test to see how it'll run Lion, start your 10.7 mini in TDM and then start the 10.6 mini holding down the Alt key to get to the boot selection screen.
You should be able to select the 10.7 system and start up from it, if this works OK then a simple clone should work for you.

 

[Giuanniello]

Hallo JBarley,

the machine running 10.6 has 2GB as far as I remember and the other one running 10.7 has 4, the strange thing is that I knew it couldn't address the whole 4 but just 3 out of them, maybe I recall it wrong.

So, that's pretty straightforward till the cloning bit through CCC, I already cloned the 10.7 system on an USB stick, so I should still start from 10.7 and use 10.6 in Target mode so I can access it as a plain hard drive, start CCC, load the backup and restore on the Target drive or use the disk utility and make the restore through the image on the USB drive on the Target one (which substantially should be the same thing, right?), am I correct?

Thank you so much for your explanation!