Cloning Snow Leopard from old iMac onto New iMac with Mountain Lion.

Question

Hi all.
My old late 2006 intel iMac (2.1Ghz, 24" white) packed in a few weeks back (most likely GPU fail, but that's another topic!).
I've picked up a good deal on a second hand machine (funds wouldn't stretch to brand new model, but iMac definitely required):
2.7Ghz, 2011 i5, 1TB, 4gb RAM (will increase that) running mountain lion.
Ran a few tests on the old machine and the Hard Drive looked absolutely fine (was new just over 18 months ago) and could be accessed via another machine.
That was running Snow Leopard (upgrade from original OSX back in 2006) and easily ran FCP and Logic Pro post upgrade to SL.
What I would like to do really is clone my old hard drive (and I have a time machine back up on an external drive) onto this new machine.  However, I'm not quite sure whether I'd lose Mountain Lion (if my old s/w such as Logic Pro 7 and FCP suite will run ok on ML I'd like to keep it as I quite like it.
Not having any discs with this iMac (Mountain Lion not requiring them), would I be able to re install Mountain Lion if I'd cloned a Snow Leopard drive onto it?
Apologies if this is an obvious question!!  If I could still run FCP and Logic successfully on Mavericks, I might even upgrade to that also (not sure yet!).
Given the price of the thunderbird cables I'll be using a FW800-FW400 (cost 4x as less) to transfer.  I'll probably use 'super duper' to clone.
Am I along the righ lines folks?
Many thanks.
somapop.

Answer 1

I only mentioned partitioning because you indicated that you wanted both Snow Leopard and Mavericks capability on the newly acquired iMac.  Of course, you cannot have both flavors of OS X on the same hard drive unless it is partitioned to keep them separate.
Once you have Snow Leopard in one partition and Mavericks in the other, "dual-booting" is simply the process of determining which flavor or OS X will be operating by using the Startup  Manager in System Preferences before you reboot, or holding down the OPTION key while you do reboot.
The disadvantage to this approach is that you cannot have both Snow Leopard and Mavericks running concurrently.  To have that capability, you must install Snow Leopard Server into a virtualization program such as Parallels running in Mavericks and then they can run concurrently:
                              [click on image to enlarge]
More information on this approach here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439