OptiBay Limbo - will apps installed to USB still be useable once drive is 'internal'?

[peanutismint]

I've just upgraded my MBP's hard drive to a 60GB solid state drive. I've also ordered an opti-bay enclosure to mount a second hard drive in lieu of my superdrive, but it's taking its sweet time to arrive and I have work to do.

I put my old hard drive (the one that's going in the optibay) in an external USB enclosure temporarily so I could still have easy access to all my media files etc. The entire file system and OS X installation is still intact, just on the USB drive now instead of an internal drive. However, this means I'm unable to work on things like audio projects as there's no space to install things like software instruments on my SSD and although they're all existent on my external HDD, pre-created projects can't 'find' them as they expect the drive to be internal....I guess they're looking for the plugins etc in the SSD's home folder rather than the USB drive's home folder....

I hope some of that makes sense!!

Basically what I'm wondering is, is there any way to make my pre-created projects work with the files from the USB drive rather than the internal SSD... Would it involve changing the drive identifier to make my MBP think that the USB was in fact a second internal drive? OR could I just boot from the USB drive temporarily? Otherwise I guess the next option would be to re-install the old HDD while I'm working on these projects and then swap back to the SSD once I'm done??

If anyone has any ideas please let me know. Thanks!

 

[Mal]

The Mac doesn't really care whether a drive is internal or external, except for the boot order. It uses the drive name as the identifier for most things, so moving a drive from the external USB case to the internal Optibay won't affect anything you've set up.

As far as telling programs to look to the external drive, that's done on a case-by-case basis. Since you're talking about audio stuff, someone else will have to chime in with specific directions on how to make the programs you're using specify the location where they store stuff. It'd be helpful if you'd tell us exactly what programs you're using and what information you'd like to store on the drive that's in the USB enclosure for now.

jW

 

[peanutismint]

Thanks for your reply -

if the Mac doesn't care about internal/external, then to simplify let's think about things in terms of 'Drive A', the HDD which holds the old, bootable Mac OS X install and all of my files, and 'Drive B', the SSD which contains the new fresh Mac OS X install.

Now, I don't really expect to be able to use all of Drive A's apps and their plugins etc when booted to the OS installed on Drive B, although I know I can easily access and use files like music and videos on Drive A. In view of this, when I install the old drive in my optibay, I will probably wipe it of its old OS and apps etc, and then restore all my media etc from another external backup drive. With this in mind, I am fully expecting to have to re-install all my apps and plugins, but as Drive B is very small compared to Drive A, I will be installing the larger components of apps on Drive A, such as large sample banks etc. Once I've done this I'm sure OS X will know exactly where all the files are, even if they're on a separate drive.

So, in the meantime, maybe it'd be better for me to try and just boot the old OS from Drive A? I assume it's formatted in the right way (GUID partition table) and I've tried finding it in the Startup Disk options but it doesn't show up... any ideas of how to boot from it??