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Transfer HD to new Mac?

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macrumors 68000
Original poster
If I was to get a new Mac, could I just take my hard drive out of my current mac and put it in the new one? Would this work or do I have to start over and reinstall the OS with the new one? Thanks for any help
 
You would want to do that. You best bet would be get the fastest cable that can go between the two Macs. Then on the new Mac use /Applications./Utilities/Migration Assistant and get the documents, music, pictures, expensive applications to transfer top the new Mac.
 
I just bought and set-up a new iMac. When you first power on, it will ask if you have a prior Mac and if you want to transfer files, programs and settings from the old Mac to the new one. You will have a choice of using Firewire, ethernet, or wifi. I chose to transfer all files data using ethernet. This took about 2.5 hours and essentially created an exact clone of my old computer on the new Mac, without changing anything on the old Mac.
 
I know how to use migration assistant, I've done it before. I was wondering if I could just take out the hard drive in the new Mac and put in my existing hard drive. Does anyone know if this will work? Seems like it would to me, I just don't want to deal with trying to transfer all my data to the new drive, I would rather just swap them out.
 
If you are going from PowerPC to Intel it will not work though or if you have an older version of OS X it will not work on a Mac created after it. So Tiger/Leopard would be a no go on a Mac that was introduced after Snow Leopard.
 
velocityg4 said:
If you are going from PowerPC to Intel it will not work though or if you have an older version of OS X it will not work on a Mac created after it. So Tiger/Leopard would be a no go on a Mac that was introduced after Snow Leopard.
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No yeah it's going from one C2D machine to another, I think it'll be ok
 
mwhities said:
Report back after you do, I'm interested in seeing the results.
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Alright I'll let you know. Mail comes at around 3pm so I'll try as soon as I get it and post results. I have it all backed up to time machine so I can just fresh install if it doesn't work, but I was hoping that I could avoid all that work 😉
 
Just received the new Mac and successfully put the existing hard drive in and started it up. No issues whatsoever, exactly the same as my old mac.

I did this transfer between two C2D machines, one was a macbook and the other was a macbook pro
 
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