How to use friend's mac while mine in for repair?

[mortenjensen]

Hi all,
It looks like my MBP15-ultimo11 is going in for its third logic board replacement. The last one was barely 4 months ago.
This time, I can borrow a friend's MBA. Last time, I borrowed a MBP13 and just swapped the harddrives. Nice thing to do.
I guess my MBP will be in for a weeks work. So I need to be able to use my setup. I see two options:
- booting from a usb-drive (if that is possible, you can choose start up disk in preference, but I don't know if it will boot from my disk mounted in an usb-caddy).
- backing up his drive to a usb-drive and installing my setup on his ssd. But I do not have any program to do this, or have I? Is this possible easily?

Thanks
Morten

 

[theitsage]

You can buy a SATA USB adapter and boot off of your hard drive. It definitely works, not very portable though. I don't think it's worth it to mess with your friend's internal flash drive and data.

 

[poiihy]

I suggest you boot from your disk by holding option key at startup instead of setting the disk as default startup disk and restarting.

You will be able to boot from your USB disk drive caddy, just remember the volume has to have a bootable OS on it. This means you need to use the actual disk drive from the broken Mac, not a time machine backup (I assume you are already doing this.)

 

[mortenjensen]

Hey, this is great news. I have several usb-hd-compartments (sata) + also a DVD caddy that I could use as well. I will go with the option key upon start up.

Morten