Internal HD transfer, MBP->Mini

[VNM]

I have a late 2006 MacBook Pro, 2.16 Core 2 Duo and just purchased a Mac Mini mid-2009 model. I had replaced the harddrive in the macbook pro with a Scorpio Black, so my question is if I can just take that out of my laptop and stick it into the mac mini or not? I don't want to go through restoring. It has snow leopard installed, so would there be any driver problems?

Thanks

 

[b01189]

I would go out and buy a hard drive case drop your old MBP drive in to the external hard drive case. Rather than tearing apart your Mac Mini also, to the point i believe Mac Mini has a 3.5in drive and your laptop only has a 2.5in the SATA connections for power are different sized. I don't believe there is and an adapter for that... But the external case should do it for you, heres a link for what I'm talking about. Good luck...


http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4322446&CatId=2783

 

[VNM]

It runs 2.5" drives from what I've read, and I'd rather have a 320GB 7200 RPM drive inside of it vs. the stock one which is slow from benchmarks I saw.

 

[b01189]

If the Mac mini runs 2.5 then your good to go. But having the larger and faster drive is much better in the MBP. I did it my self to my late 07 MBP took a 160 gig 7200rpm and changed it out to a 320 7200rpm with at 16meg cache, works wonders for importing HD video on the fly.

 

[VNM]

But can I just do a direct transfer of the drive to get all my data over to the mini without problems? I plan on selling the laptop.

 

[b01189]

Yes when your 1st putting which ever OSX you choose on to your new drive you put in your mini, it will ask during your set up process if you have another computer you would like to transfer data from. Basically what it does is clone the drive your copying on to your mini. All your programs files preferences every thing on that hard drive will be copied over.

Only thing you will need for that is a 6 to 6 pin firewire cable to connect the to computers. Program Migration Assistant actually handles the transfer, which if you have OSX already installed you can run this program. Its under utilities in your applications folder.

 

[VNM]

I'm trying to avoid doing that, I want to use the faster drive in the mini and avoid transfer/restoring from time machine. Thanks for the instructions though.

 

[b01189]

No problem... Good luck with your mods.

 

[AppleNewton]

If Snow Leopard on the MBP is uptodate (10.6.2) yeah i think you should be fine with just plopping it in the Mini and run it from there, and shouldnt have any issues.

 

[VNM]

It's fully updated, good to know it will work.