Install on hard drive and move to other Mac?

[Kenny Pollock]

Have a MacBook that refuses to boot from 10.4 or 10.6 installation media. Media works on all other computers. It doesn't show me any startup options when I hold alt, just a gray screen with a cursor. It won't boot from my external USB DVD drive either.

Running out of options, and I've literally taken apart and put back together this MacBook Pro (A1150) 4-5 times... I know the screws and can dissassemble within 3 minutes now.

Thinking about putting hard drive in another Mac, installing Snow Leopard and popping it back in the MBP... not sure if that would work? Does the installer setup system-specific drivers and files?

Thank you

 

[mBox]

Ive done this many times using Mac Pro but not MBP.
Curious to see how you make out.

 

[Consultant]

Sounds like you are trying to use the media for another computer.

What does the disks look like?

 

[velocityg4]

Yes this will work. As long as the Mac performing the install is another Intel Mac. This sort of thing has been supported since at least System 6. I imagine this was supported back to System 1 but the oldest I have used is 6.

 

[davidlv]

A friend and I just did that 2 days ago, installing SL on a 250GB Toshiba 5,400 rpm drive in an external USB HD using my MBP 2009, did all the available updates, and then transferred the HD to a MacBook2.1, late 2006 Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz CPU. Booted up just fine. Even handled the different screen resolution effortlessly. Also installed 2 2GB RAM chips, and as noted elsewhere, the system only uses 3 of the 4GB (the next model out in 2007 can handle all 4GB). However, compared with the orginal 512MB and 60GB HD, the machine is surprisingly quick and may last my friend quite some time now.

 

[Kenny Pollock]

Thanks guys for taking out all the guesswork. I was able to install it to a new hard drive on a different machine and transfer after install.

Just curious... I couldn't setup Boot Camp and install Windows on a different machine and THEN transfer the hard drive could I?!?!

 

[mBox]

Thanks guys for taking out all the guesswork. I was able to install it to a new hard drive on a different machine and transfer after install.

Just curious... I couldn't setup Boot Camp and install Windows on a different machine and THEN transfer the hard drive could I?!?!

Done it many times.
But again I work with similar Mac Pros.

 

[velocityg4]

Thanks guys for taking out all the guesswork. I was able to install it to a new hard drive on a different machine and transfer after install.

Just curious... I couldn't setup Boot Camp and install Windows on a different machine and THEN transfer the hard drive could I?!?!

It's not quite as quick and smooth as Mac OS X. But it should work fine with Windows 7, same holds true for Vista and Server 2008. It may reboot a few times as it installs the correct drivers or generic drivers, you'll also have to copy the bootcamp driver installer files to run after the swap. This was a real pain in XP if you didn't run Sysprep first.