Swap Hard Drive from 15" MBP to 13" MBP

I have decided my two month old 15" MacBook Pro is just too big to lug around with me all the time and am going to replace it with a new 13" MacBook Pro. Can I just swap the drive from my 15 to my 13 and expect everything to work? It is a larger 7200 RPM 500 GB HD so I want to use it in my new machine and don't want to have to play musical chairs with the data if I can avoid it.
Thanks!

No - you are better off migrating the data. Migration Assistant will do the job. OS X installs are specific to the machine they are installed on, and the hardware configuration of that machine.

Similar Messages

Can I swap hard drive from my Macbook (10.5.8) into Macbook Pro (10.6)?

I have a white Macbook from 2007 (model A1181, 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, OSX 10.5.8 installed) which I upgraded with a 500GB hard drive. I now have Macbook Pro (model A1278, 2.53GHz, 10.6 fresh install from disc, 250GB hdd).
I would like to swap the 500GB drive from the Macbook into the MBP so I can transfer over all my settings and apps. Will that upgrade work? If not, what's the best method to perform this upgrade so I can restore my system on the MBP? I use TimeMachine and SuperDuper to backup my Macbook if that matters. Thank for any input!

No, once you put the older MacBook drive in, if it even fits, you can't transfer to the new one because it's not physically in the MacBookPro anymore.
And the MacBookPro may not be able to read a 10.5 boot disk if it shipped with 10.6.
They are not backwards compatible when trying to boot from an older machines drive that probably doesn't have the correct drivers to run on a MacPro.
First,
Try using Disk Utility to do a Disk Repair, as shown in this link, while booted up on your install disk in case you have some directory corruption.
Let us know what errors Disk Utility reports and if DU was able to repair them. Disk Utility's Disk Repair is not perfect and may not find or repair all directory issues. A stronger utility may be required to finish the job. Better, run DiskWarrior if you have it.
After that Repair Permissions.
No need to report Permissions errors....we all get them.
Then use Target Disk Mode and Migration Assistant to move settings and data.
Make sure all your apps. are 10.6 compatible. I would trash any plug ins also.
I followed this routine and had no troubles.
DALE

Swapping hard drive from one MacBook to another

I'll spare you the gory details, but my daughter broke the screen on her 2.0 Core Duo MacBook, one of the original ones. It has a 250 gb hard drive that I put in to replace the small stock drive. We are replacing this MacBook with a new one, a 2.0 Core 2 Duo. What I would like to do is simply swap out the hard drive from the old and out it in the new one. The old one does have Leopard. Is there any reason this would not work? Thanks.
(Also, is there any market anywhere for a MacBook that works fine except for the broken screen?)

twincities1 wrote:
I'll spare you the gory details, but my daughter broke the screen on her 2.0 Core Duo MacBook, one of the original ones. It has a 250 gb hard drive that I put in to replace the small stock drive. We are replacing this MacBook with a new one, a 2.0 Core 2 Duo. What I would like to do is simply swap out the hard drive from the old and out it in the new one. The old one does have Leopard. Is there any reason this would not work? Thanks.
You may need to run Leopard install again on the drive when it's in the new MacBook. There will be some drivers and stuff that won't be on there that the new one needs. You could probably just do an upgrade to do this.
(Also, is there any market anywhere for a MacBook that works fine except for the broken screen?)
You could consider keeping it and hooking it to an external monitor and use it that way as a spare computer.
You could also look online at some of the MacBook repir shops and see if they buy broken MacBooks for parts.

Can I swap hard drives from a 13.3" MBP and a 15" MBP?

Hello,
I have a 13.3" MacBook Pro with a 500Gb HD in it. Tomorrow I'm upgrading to a 15" MacBook Pro. Can I just swap the HD's round? If I can't do that, whats the best way of moving the data?
Thanks
Mark

If the drives both have the same version of OS on them (ie, both are 10.6.2 for example) then I doubt you will have problems (though in some cases where different "builds" of the same OS version occur, difficulties can arise) . If the drive from the old computer has a newer version of the OS installed than the new computer (quite common to find if you update your OS software whenever new releases come out) then it will probably work without problems.
If the drive you are trying to install has an older version of the OS on it, though, it probably will not work at all, and, if it does, you are likely to have other problems along the way.
Other quirks can occur when doing this, however. You may find that you run into networking issues, for example, because after the swap, depending on how you have gone about dealing with account info etc., both your old and new Macs may have the same "network identity" for some purposes.
With two current model computers like yours simply using Migration assistant, with the computers connected either by a firewire cable or an ethernet cable, should probably work fine as an alternative.
Cheers
Rod

Swap hard drive from G4 14" 1.33 to a G4 14" 1.2?

After my display in my G4 14" 1.33 bit the dust (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6439953) and giving up on a fix, I've come across another G4 14". According to the owner, a Genius has said the hard drive is dead. While I'm proceeding with caution, if this is indeed the case, it may be worth the fix.
Here are the differences between the two machines:
- It's got a 1.2 in it vs. my 1.33
- It has a little more RAM: 768 vs. my 512
- It has a Combo drive vs. my Super drive
The magic question: Can I drop my 1.33 working hard drive into this machine without major consequences? While I don't want to lose all data, it's not a big deal if I do. I just want the drive to work in this machine.
The secondary question: Is swapping out the Combo for my Super possible? Is this as simple as taking out the old one and popping in the new one?
Thanks for your help!
Message was edited by: Lactoes

Lance,
Well here we are again.
Well so that new 1.33 did boot but you're getting the folder-? Do you have the original installer or the silver on black retail installer. Will the new one boot from the install disk? You might want to reinstall the OS cleanly in the new machine in situ.
Another thing:
only to completely lock up a few minutes later.
Now that still sounds like GPU.
Look on the bottom of the logic board. See that open area about 2" inboard of the headphone output jack. That should be directly under the graphics chip. It's a
ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 4x AGP (More about this later). Try placing a shim in that area. Those large square adhesive feet/bumpers that they sell at the hardware store are perfect. Make sure it's fat enough to put pressure there when the iBook is flat on the table.
Now remember in that last post when this exchange happened.
The ext display works.
So good GPU.
Well turns out that's not exactly true. Here's an email from Mike on this board:
"One thing I would like to add is that there is a misconception out
there that if the iBook will run an external display and the iBook
screen is black then the monitor/wiring/ or inverter is at fault and
the logic board is ok. Maybe ok. Mine ran an external display
perfectly and had a totally green screen on the iBook. The Apple Tech
showed me that by pressing on the area where the graphics chip was
soldered to the logic board he could make the iBook screen go from
green back to full color. As soon as he let off the pressure the
screen went green again. The eternal monitor looked perfect
throughout. I was also experiencing intermittent kernel panics as well
and the Tech told me he thought that was also a result of the loose
graphics chip explaining that the GUI ran through the graphics chip
and when the current was briefly interrupted by the loose chip this
forced the system into a kernel panic. Thought I would pass that along
maybe it will help someone. Unexplained kernel panics also could be an
early warning that there is a problem with the soldering on the
graphics chip."
So try the same trick on that board.
One bit of good news is that chip is a ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 4x AGP and there are thousands of them out there that could be swapped in if it turns out that chip is bad.
Richard
Message was edited by: spudnuty

Problem removing hard drive from Late '08 unibody 15" MBP

Hello. I bought a new Seagate 7200rpm 500gb drive to replace the original 320gb 5400rpm drive my MBP came with. I cloned the 320 and upgraded it to Snow Leopard with no problems. After making sure everything was ok. I shut down to swap drives and therein lies the problem. When I tried to remove the single screw securing the HD the head didn't budge and instead kinda became stripped. Mind you this was using a new phillips driver. So I'm kinda in a hard spot. How can I fix my problem? Do I now need to bring it in to a Apple Store? I have AppleCare. I don't know if Apple uses extra soft screws or what. I've worked on computers for about 15 years and have never had this happen before. Anyone got any suggestions? Currently I'm running my MBP off the 500gb drive via a external USB2 enclosure.
Thanks

I don't think you have any choice now but to take the machine in for service. You won't be able to grip that particular screw head with pliers, and even if you could, you'll need a replacement screw now. Assuming your Phillips driver is actually the proper size for the screw, you may want to take it along with you to show that you used the right tool, in case anyone is skeptical. (It's amazing how many people imagine that they can get away with using just anything, despite clear instructions about what tools to use.)
My experience with quite a few Powerbooks was that the screws Apple used in them were indeed soft. I haven't had enough experience with MBP screws to comment on them.

Can I swap hard drives?

Hi.
I have a T400 with T9400 chipset. All (3) USB's have broken over the years and I recently purchased a used T400 on ebay with T9600 chipset to replace the older computer.
My question is can I simply swap hard drive from old computer to the new one and have everything work? The current computer is 64-bit Windows 7 and newer one is 32-bit...
Thanks for help!

>>> The current computer is 64-bit Windows 7 and newer one is 32-bit...
That statement is irrelevant. Either computer can run either Windows 7 version, no problem -- 4GB RAM addressability being the main limitation of the 32-bit version.
I would give it a try. Unless there are significant device differences (which I doubt), Windows 7 system loaded from the "old" HDD will work fine on the "new" ThinkPad.
In any event, I would rather use this opportunity to do a clean installation of Windows 7 64-bit, for which you have a COA key.

How to swap hard drives?

I currently have a mid-2007 white Macbook with Tiger OS. I'm thinking of purchasing a 13" Macbook Pro, but would like to swap hard drives since my current one is 320gb 7200rpm.
What's the best way to do this? Can I just swap the drives out, and then reformat them with the installation discs? I don't mind reformatting the hard drives because I have all of my data backed up to an external already.

Yes, you can swap, reinstall the OS from the DVDs that come with the new MBP, then use Migration Assistant to transfer the data form your external backup.

The hard drive on my 2009 midyear 13" MBP died. I found this on Amazon and want to know if it is a good replacement choice: Western Digital WD Scorpio Black 750 GB SATA 3 GB/s 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Internal Bulk/OEM 2.5-Inch Mobile Hard Drive

The hard drive on my 2009 midyear 13" MBP died. I found this on Amazon and want to know if it is a good replacement choice: Western Digital WD Scorpio Black 750 GB SATA 3 GB/s 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Internal Bulk/OEM 2.5-Inch Mobile Hard Drive

If you are going to upgrade your harddisk, why not upgrade to SSD harddisk. You macbook pro supports SATA II SSD drives acccording to these Specs. SATA III is backward compatible with SATA II, so you can buy SATA III drive if you can't find SATA II drives.
Upgrading to SATA II SSD drive you give you super fast performence.
These are a few Segate SSD drives from amazon, that are not that expensive, I guess.
As for Western Digital vs Segate comparison, I second clintonfrombirmingham's suggestion. Western Digital never works for me.
*** After the harddisk upgrade
Install latest OS if possible
Update your EFI firmware
and clean NVRAM http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

Swapping hard drives between two different HP mini towers DC7600 TO DC7900

I would like to know if it will be possible to take out and re-install the Hard drive from my HP DC7600 tower running XP Pro over to my HP DC 7900 tower and remove the hard drive running windows 7 with out having to reinstall my Win XP OS . Is it possible ? What problems may i encounter ?? Are the Motherboard drivers similar so as not to have replace them ? i am hoping that this can be a plug and play operation - thanks GGW

Hello @grant1951,
I understand that you are looking to swap the hard drive from a HP Compaq dc7600 Convertible Minitower PC to a HP Compaq dc7900 Business PC. As both of these computer as commercial units, I would suggest posting it in the commercial forums, since these are commercial products. You can do this at Business PCs - Compaq, Elite, Pro.
I hope this helps. Thank you for posting on the HP Forums. Have a great day!
Please click the "Thumbs Up" on the bottom right of this post to say thank you if you appreciate the support I provide!
Also be sure to mark my post as “Accept as Solution" if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others who face the same challenge find the same solution.
Dunidar
I work on behalf of HP
Find out a bit more about me by checking out my profile!
"Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong." ~ Donald Porter

Swapping hard drives between PXI-8115 and PXI-8105 won't boot up

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.
Here's a summary of my situation:
An old system has PXI-8105 running WinXP
A new system has PXI -8115 running Win7
A hard drive (with Win7) from the PXI-8115 won't boot on the PXI-8105
A hard drive (with WinXP) from the PXI-8105 won't boot on the PXI-8115
What is different between the two PXI controllers that keeps me from swapping hard drives?
Jim
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.
2. In general, Windows is not very tolerant of swapping hard drives between completely different systems, especially with Windows XP and prior. Consider whether just installing fresh and copying over what you need is faster than trying to do this, but if you must, I would suspect that Windows 7 would be more tolerant of the swap.
3. As a debugging step, try pressing 'F8' during the boot process to launch the Windows boot menu and try safe mode or some of the other options. More information here.
4. If all else fails, Google is your friend here as there's nothing particularly specific about this being an NI product that you need to know when attempting this operation. Any information you find online about swapping hard drives between PCs should be relevant to your situation. Searching for 'swap hard drive to new computer windows 7' gave some useful hits on the first page. Beyond that, you can also look into using the 'sysprep' utility to try and clean the system and prepare for swapping to a new PC.

Restore Hard Drive from Backup DVD's

Own 4 HP G7 Windows 7 system
one computer was showing the fan was overheating and requested to be turned off soon
turned it off
Took hard drive out of the unit A with the fan problems and swapped with the hardrive from
unit B (another G7)
Computer A or B would not boot properly
So I ran a HP backup of the Hard drive from A which is now in unit B requested 10 DVD's seems to have backuped with out problems but could only boot in safe mode
Took the unit A in for repair-Fan was dirty, they cleaned it, and it worked fine-exchanged hard drives back to origiinal state A with A and B with B
B started without a problem and was normal
A had problems and the tech said they need to reinstall opeating system to boot but would not damage data.
Opened B but it had no data. Used the DVD to restore but hung up on 2nd DVD at 4 % and said could not find hard drive (1st DVD was OK)
All 10 DVD have swm files so I took it to a data recovery repair shop. They said they can read and retrieve most files but when un zipped they were corrupted and could not be read.
Need the data for my son's college work stored.
DVD's seem to have data but can not retrieve or reload. Original haed drive in A seems to have been over written and data is no longer there but have DVD's the backup was with HP software onto DVD but can not retrive the files. Can HP retrieve the compressed files from the DVD's for a restore?
Seems that the units both G7's had different proceessors one was dual he other not and the backup was made while the hard drives were swapped out. Please advise as what can be done.

Hi @TonyBlair1 ,
Thank you for your inquiry, I will do my best to assist you!
Please remember when posting to include your exact model of G7 you have.
How Do I Find My Model Number or Product Number?
I grasp that you have 4, G7 notebooks running Windows 7. Computer A had a overheating issue and you removed the hard drive and swapped it with computer B.
Neither computer would boot properly.
So you ran a backup from A which is in computer B from safe mode.
You took unit A in and had it repaired.
You replaced drive A into computer A and drive B back in computer B.
B worked normally.
Now Drive A Computer A
The tech advised you that you need to reinstall Windows to boot but it would not affect your files. You attempted to use your DVDs to do a restore but on 2nd DVD you get an error no hard drive found.
First I would like to clarify, did you do a Microsoft backup and restore or did you do a HP recovery and backup?
As you did stated you used HP software I am providng links on recovery.
Using System Recovery, Factory Reset and Minimized Image Recovery Options
Performing an HP System Recovery (Windows 7)
Troubleshooting HP System Recovery Problems (Windows 7)
Restoring Files that were Backed Up Using HP Recovery Manager (Windows 7)
I hope this helps.
Sparkles1
I work on behalf of HP
Please click “Accept as Solution ” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.
Click the “Kudos, Thumbs Up" on the bottom right to say “Thanks” for helping!

How do I remove one failing hard drive from raid set and replace with new one

Last Friday apparently one of my raid drives started failing.
As I mentioned on this forum I started getting continous beeping.
I was finally able to get the raid working at a degraded level. I ordered a replacement hard drive which is arriving today.
(In the meantime I made twice daily backups of my work.....)
Below was the message I got from the browser based raid software:
Blahblah 09    1000.2GB   RaidSet Member SamSung HD103SJ
Blahblah 10    1000.2GB     Free                 SamSung HD103SJ
Blahblah 11    1000.2GB   RaidSet Member SamSung HD103SJ
Blahblah 12    1000.2GB   RaidSet Member SamSung HD103SJ
(See this earlier thread if you wish!)
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/727867?tstart=0
At one point when I did the checked the browser interface I saw the message Failed and Degraded
As I said, I was able to work over the weekend on the degraded system.
This morning I got the beeping again and did the rescue and now I am running a "full raid" without the notice that one raid was "Free".
In any case, the new hard drive is arriving today.
What steps should I take to incorporate the new drive into the raid system.
I have one OS drive
and 4 tb raid drives.   One needs to be replaced with the new one that I am getting today.
Thanks
Rowby

Harm,
Regarding your comment:
Re: How do I remove one failing hard drive from raid set and replace with new one
Please tell me how to read the serial number from an individual drive rather easily, without un-installing them:
If you select the proper drive to change out, you only need to remove one drive and look at its serial number...
Step 1: Identify bad drive serial number using Areca's tools
Step 2: Turn off the computer
Step 3: Remove what you think is the bad drive based on following your numbered cable method, marked hot-swap bays, whatever
Step 4: Verify that the serial number matches the "bad drive" serial number from step 1; if it does great, proceed; if it does not match, go back to step 3
Step 5: Change out the CORRECT drive - that's the bottom line for this whole procedure
Cheers,
Jim

Swapped hard drive boot problem

Swapped hard drives between 6530b and 6535b, neither boots. What did I miss? (Toshiba MK3255GSX and Hitachi HTS543223L9A300)

Disk Utility - Erase (drive, not volume) and make sure it is now GPT/GUID and not old Apple Partition Table format.
Even though it is data only, there can and are some problems (the older it was last formatted the more so perhaps).
Just pull the data off if needed. Handy to have a FW drive case for SATA laying around.
Migrating OS and apps from G5 to Intel is full of potential pitfalls.
Depending on the drive age, size, performance, I'd probably go for a WD Caviar 640GB $75 to transfer files onto, and then wipe the Maxtor and use it for an emergency backup drive off which you can run Disk Warrior and such.

Do I need startup discs to upgrade hardware on MacBook Pro or can I restore the hard drive from from a Time Machine backup?

do I need startup discs to upgrade hardware on MacBook Pro or can I restore the hard drive from from a Time Machine backup?

Ok, well go and grab a small 2.5" hard drive enclosure so you can put the new drive in & temporarily use it like an external hard drive.
Download Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper and make a bootable clone of your current HDD on the new HDD.
Once that's done you can test the clone by booting from it. To do this hold Optioni while booting to select the external (new) drive. If everything looks ok, you can go ahead and swap over the HDD's.
So much easier.

Swap Hard Drive from 15" MBP to 13" MBP

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