Moving OS hard drives between Macs of different makes/models

Is it okay to move the operating system hard drive (E.g. the Boot drive) from one mac to another? What about from one model of mac (E.g. a Mac Mini) to a different model. (Mac Pro) In the PC world, this is an absolute no no due to drivers, registry issues, and other problems. However, I've spoken to a couple of mac technicians who say it's perfectly acceptable and works "flawlessly."
The reason i'm asking is because we recently built a new boot drive for one of our Mac Pros (2010 model) using a Mac Mini (2012). The tech installed the OS and all the applications using his mac mini and then moved the hard drive to the mac pro. Now we are having a bunch of weird issues with this specific mac pro such as lock ups and other glitches. We are now wondering if perhaps the issue is related to the build process used.
Thanks for any advice you can provide.

MattRK wrote:
...However, I've spoken to a couple of mac technicians who say it's perfectly acceptable and works "flawlessly."...
I'd say only if you're really lucky, but since you're having issues, you apparently weren't.
...We are now wondering if perhaps the issue is related to the build process used...
As The hatter has said, you'd need the machine-specific installer (i.e., Mac OS 10.6.4) for a 2010 Mac Pro which wasn't what was done.
However, since it looks like you're using Lion now, if you download and install the 10.7.5 combo updater, a good portion of the operating system will be replaced and customized for the Mac Pro. You can try that to see if the various glitches are cured. There are similar combo updaters for Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion which can accomplish pretty much the same thing.

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Anthony1900 wrote:
Could someone please give me step-by-step instructions on how I can share an external hard drive between my powerpc(running 10.4.11) and my macbook air(running 10.5.6)? I would like to do this with out any external software.
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Greeting, I want to reformat my external hard drive using Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted ) but before formatting it, I want to make sure that if I loose the hard drive or the hard drive get stolen, no one will be able to retrieve or recover the in

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I have a test system running Windows XP on PXI-8105. I've upgraded the entire test system for another project and need to upgrade my existing systems; the upgrade runs on Windows 7 and PXI-8115. I have new hard drives with Windows 7 and the new test software which were loaded/configured/tested on a PXI-8115, but I need to retrofit the PXI-8105 with them. This doesn't work. Windows begins to boot but fails and tries over and over again. In an effort to take the PXI-8105 off-line to troubleshoot, I replaced it with one of the PXI-8115 and the old (WinXP) drive. This didn't boot up, either.
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You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are. ~ Alice
Solved!
Go to Solution.

A couple thoughts:
1. Windows 7 probably works fine on a PXI-8105. Although NI never officially supported or shipped that configuration, I suspect that the default Windows 7 installation contains enough of the driver support needed to boot up.
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The version of the OS that is running is not relevant to formatting the drive. When you format a drive in any OS, you should select "Mac OS extended journaled." (That is, unless you plan to share the drive with a Windows computer.) Formatted this way, the drive can be used with any version of Mac OS.
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