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Make bootable drive to move from Mac Pro to Macbook Pro?

H

hualon

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 5, 2008
252
0
I have a Late 2013 6-core Mac Pro running Yosemite. I like it a lot but the embarrassing truth is that I don't use it enough to keep it around.

My company gave me a 15" Macbook Pro Retina that is more than enough for my needs so I'd like to replace my Mac Pro with that hardware while I'm at home.

What I'd like to do is create a bootable hard drive that's a clone of my Mac Pro user account so that it has all of my personal programs, personal files, etc. but just use the company's Macbook Pro hardware.

I have SuperDuper and ample USB3 hard drive space to do this. My question is: Can I just simply make a bootable clone of my Mac Pro's boot disk, plug it into the Macbook Pro, and then log in as if nothing changed? Will that work given the drastic difference in hardware?

Second question: will I have a miserable time running my OS and programs (like Lightroom, etc.) off of a USB3 boot drive? Would it be better to just create a new account on the Macbook instead and start from scratch?
 
Assuming you mean a new 15" Macbook, then no this won't work with Yosemite since it won't have the driver etc needed to run on the Macbook. But if you did the clone then updated the cloned drive to El Capitan then it would work just fine since El Capitan would have the drivers you need for the new 15".

Lot's of people run from an external USB3 drive and it works pretty well, but won't be near as fast as internal flash storage in the new Macbook.

If it was me, I would just migrate everything over from the old machine using the cloned drive as the source. When you turn on the new system you will be asked if you want to import... just say yes and follow the prompts. That will bring in your old account and all your apps and data from the cloned drive. Do not create an account then afterward try to migrate as that can cause problems.
 
Thanks for the reply! I should have been more detailed; apologies.

The Macbook is approximately the same vintage (September 2013, I think?). It is running El Capitan already and has an account that I'd like to preserve and reserve exclusively for work purposes. I'd like another way to use that hardware without disturbing my work account.

1. The way I see it I can either boot my Mac Pro's disk image from external drive
2. If possible (how?) import the Mac Pro account, files, preferences, etc. as a new and separate administrator account on the MBP
3. Just make a new "home" account on the MBP and manually reinstall everything I want (maybe best option?)

edit: I have no problem updating the MP to El Capitan if it's helpful first.
 
Ahh... gotcha. :)

1. Yeah... that would work straight up with no changes or OS upgrades.
2. As long as the Pro and MBP accounts have different names and different user ID numbers, you could just run Migration Assistant from the existing Pro account to bring in the MBP account. When you get to this screen in the migration, just UNcheck everything except the user account so that is all that comes over.

migration_item_costumize.png


3. That would sure work, but the Migration Assistant will handle this for you.
 
This is a bit OT, but my question is part of the moving-accounts thing.

My partner's retina Macbook needed repair. Before we sent it out, I created an account for her on my rMBP, and then started up User Migration on her MB and on mine. I got the message saying that an account was already there, and how about overwriting it. I said yes.

When the migration was complete, there were two completely unexpected issues.

First, the logon screen showed only my account. To get her logged in, she had to log in as me, then log out as me and only then could she see her own login screen.

Second, restarts and cold starts displayed the El Cap login screen first, and the boot progress bar was overlaying that.

We let it go because it was only for a few days until the Macbook came back. I've now deleted her account, but I still get that weirdness on startup.

I'll just wipe and do a clean install one of these days (it's not my primary machine) but I'd like to know what I did wrong (if anything). I've made accounts for other people on Macbooks and Mac Pros before, and nothing like this ever happened.
 
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