Quick hard drive swap question

[kremer4]

I'm 90% sure this will work but I'm just double checking my slight doubt.

I currently have a 15" Unibody Macbook Pro with a 500GB (running OS 10.5.6) hard drive.

I have a 17" Unibody Macbook Pro on order. When I receive the 17 can I just put the 15" hard drive in the 17" and will it boot up just fine without any errors or OS issues. I know this might seem obvious but i'm just making sure.

 

[alexbates]

I'm 90% sure this will work but I'm just double checking my slight doubt.

I currently have a 15" Unibody Macbook Pro with a 500GB hard drive.

I have a 17" Unibody Macbook Pro on order. When I receive the 17 can I just put the 15" hard drive in the 17" and will it boot up just fine without any errors or OS issues. I know this might seem obvious but i'm just making sure.

Yeah, as long as it runs Mac OS, it should be fine.

 

[kremer4]

Yes, 10.5.6. Thanks.

I also have a Bootcamp partition with Vista x64, I'm pretty sure that will work too.

 

[human5892]

I once did a hard drive "transplant" like this between two G5s, and the recipient G5 did not like it. Finder would randomly crash several times an hour, apps would perform extremely slowly, etc. I'm not sure if there was some other variable at play besides just the hard drive swap (i.e., perhaps the two were on different versions of 10.5), but it's something for you to consider before going ahead with this.

 

[alexbates]

I once did a hard drive "transplant" like this between two G5s, and the recipient G5 did not like it. Finder would randomly crash several times an hour, apps would perform extremely slowly, etc. I'm not sure if there was some other variable at play besides just the hard drive swap (i.e., perhaps the two were on different versions of 10.5), but it's something for you to consider before going ahead with this.

If you want to, you can just do a Time Machine backup of your 17-in as soon as you get it setup, and when you hook up your 15-in MBP HD you can restore from that backup. I'm not sure if that would make much of a difference but it will guarantee that you wont have those types of problems again.

 

[fleali88]

Migration utility FTW

 

[mrkgoo]

I wouldn't have thought it were that easy. Lots of preferences for particular hardware, configurations and so on. I would say there will be differences even though the machines are so similar. For example, maximum resolution for the display - is it hardwired into the firmware? Or is in the Mac OS X? Will it change it automatically when you boot?

And so on.

 

[kremer4]

I have a good time machine backup of my 15". When I get my 17 I will do a straight swap and report the results here. Otherwise I'll just do a restore.

 

[KapitanIksrog]

Any results to report? I want to pick up a 17" in store this week and swap out the 5400 for my MBP 15" 320GB/7200 and then sell the 15" with a clean drive.