Swapping Hard Drives in Identical Systems

On Friday, I had a power outage in my office. After the power came back on, my G4 Dual 1.4 would not boot up. I get power to the button, but it just illuminates then fades out. This is a whole other issue. My partner is Fedexing me his home system, which is an identical G4 Dual 1.4. My thought is, when I get his system today, to take his hard drive out and put mine in. Since his system is set up the same as mine, I am thinking this should work, and can get back to work quickly. Can someone let me know if this is OK to do. Is there anything I should be aware of? I'm not worrried about any warranty issues, as these systems are way out of warrnty and we're upgrading to new Intel Macs in just a few weeks. Thanks in advance.

If you both have "identical" Macs, there are two options.
1. You can remove the hard drive from your Mac & remove the hard drive from the other Mac. Then install your hard drive in the other Mac & boot up.
2. Install your hard drive in the other Mac & designate it as the Slave. See Power Macintosh G3 and G4: IDE Master and Slave Support and Configuration
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24342
Usually the PMU reset will fix your boot problem. However, there are some other Tips to try in the CUDA/PMU section of this link. See Mac PRAM, NVRAM, CUDA/PMU & Battery Tutorial
 Cheers, Tom

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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.

Swapping hard drives .... how does lightroom handle this ?

My photography is done on a separate computer to my online machine and the photo system never goes online ( so virus-proof ).
I use " Laser " brand hard drive racks which allow me to swap hard drives on each machine, and also to swap them between the two computers.
So I have several HDD's with different photo projects on each drive and some backups on HDD's as well.
Lightroom is a database system rather than a browser, so how will it be able to handle swapping HDD's in and out like this ? What happens if lightroom points to a file which is on another HDD not currently installed in the machine ? Will it be able to show all the thumbnails and tell me which HDD holds them ( as I believe programs like Imatch can )? Will lightroom be confused by this. Or will it set up its database on each HDD so each disc is a self-contained library with its own lightroom index ?
I know I can't be the only one with more photos than fit onto just one HDD. Can anyone please tell me how lightroom's library system deals with this situation ?

Thankyou very much for the responses so far ....
I see a potential problem because my HDD's are not permanently connected in the computer. Each HDD as it is swapped in and out is assigned the same identifier, say " drive D " or suchlike by windows. So my drive D might be any one of several HDDs .... with very different content to the previous drive D I had in the machine. If Lightroom stores its library for each of my drive D's on drive D itself, then I suspect there will not be problem because each HDD will be its own self-contained libary and Lightroom which resides on drive C will be able to operate on each one in turn. I will then have a series of HDD's dedicated to specific tasks, and can use Lightroom on all of them.
Windows works this way, where it resides on my drive C and performs operations on each drive D. It has no problem in " picking up " each new drive D at startup. I do not attempt to hot-swap.
But I do not know if this is how Lightroom operates. If Lightroom stores any of this information on drive C will it be able to differentiate between the different drive D's it is confronted with ?
Geoff's reply suggests that Lightroom might store some or all of its database/library with itself on drive C. Even this might work if the missing files are shown in red. I would just need to select the right HDD to put into the machine for the project I want to work on. Hopefully this will work like the external drive situation Andrew has described. I am using sticky labels to identify each HDD with the projects it holds at the moment ....
Sounds encouraging .... Thanks for the help.

Can I swap hard drives between 2007 and 2011 iMacs?

I have a 2007 iMac that I want to replace with a refurbished 2011 model. I had upgraded my 2007 iMac with a 1.5T hard drive and the 2011 model only comes with a 1T hard drive. And you can't do any upgrade at the Apple store on refurb units. SoI am just wanting to swap hard drives. The 2007 has 10.7 and it appears that the 2011 model has the same. (says elegible for 10.8 upgrade on Apple Store site.) I have replaced the hard drive myself, so I am familiar with the process.
Thanks.

The drives themselves are compatible, yes. However, the OS might not be. In any case, if you have a Time Machine backup (or some other backup) of the older iMac, it's best to wipe the drive and reinstall the OS once installed in the new Mac. Then you can just transfer your data, apps, and settings from the backup.
One important thing to note, though: the 2011 iMacs have temperature sensors built in on the hard drive, so if you use a drive other than one supplied by Apple specifically for that system, the fans will run at full speed all the time. Probably the easiest workaround: use something like smcFanControl to regulate the speed of the fans. Hope this helps!

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 do I transfer all my Firefox saved passwords to my new hard drive and operating system? Going from xp to windows 7.

How do I transfer all my Firefox saved passwords to my new hard drive and operating system? Going from xp to windows 7. I have the old hard drive hooked up as drive f. Can I copy and paste from old drive directory to new drive directory?

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How do I place my files on a separate hard drive from the system drive with OS X?

I have a mac pro and want to place my files on a seperate hard drive to the system. Can anybody please ad vise me what I have to do to achieve this. My OS X is Lion 10.7.5

Drag and drop will normally work if the separate hard drive is formatted right:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3003
Mind you, an external hard drive is the ideal way of backing up data. Software such as Carbon Copy Cloner or Time Machine can be used for backing up, and is much faster than using the Finder for drag and drop, and will ensure the entire system gets backed up.
Time Machine offers whole unbootable system backup with archiving. Each archive has a temporary existence as long as the backups are automatic. When you make them manual, you can copy them off to a non-time machine source to ensure they exist longer. The larger your destination drive, the longer the archives last.
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I have an iMac 17" 1.83ghz intel core from 2006. I need to reformat the hard drive. Which system do I reinstall - the system disk in came with or can I install 10.6.8 which is what it's running now. And does the system have to be for an iMac?

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Mac OS X 10.6: Reinstalling Mac OS X

Need to erase hard drive and reinstall system on iMac but have misplaced original install disks. Tried to use a my copy of Snow lepord 10.6 from my Mac pro but will not boot. Can original install disks be replaced. Thanks

Need to erase hard drive and reinstall system on iMac but have misplaced original install disks. Tried to use a my copy of Snow lepord 10.6 from my Mac Pro but will not boot. Can original install disks be replaced. Thanks

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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.
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Swapping Hard Drive problem

Hello, I have a 2008 model Macbook pro. I recently pulled the hard drive from a windows pc and replaced that drive with a SSD. The windows drive was not reformatted, I figured I could do it through Disk Utility. However, the drive does not show up. I'm assuming it's currently formatted as ntfs or fat32.
The existing drive is bootable, but the machine is put back together and it's a pain to take apart. Wondering if I can boot into something like terminal and choose to reformat the drive.
The only drive that shows up is my bootable flash drive. I do have the ability to hook up the old drive through a USB to SATA adapter, and possibly boot that way. If I can get it to boot from that external drive, is there a way to format the newly installed drive without having to rip the whole thing a part?
I had a hard time with the * shaped screws getting them in and out, so I'm trying to avoid having to remove the drive again....
Any tips would be appreciated!

More info: I think there is something wrong on the motherboard side all of a sudden. Now when I put the original drive in it doesn't boot up anymore. I wonder if while removing the old drive, I damaged the Hard Drive Connector? I just ordered a replacement on ebay (only 9 bucks). What is odd is I'm pretty careful about removing things, since I have replaced many laptop components over the years, so I don't think I did anything damaging when swapping hard drives.
The laptop did work fine, but since it is a 5400 RPM drive, I wanted speed, so I wanted to just put a 7200 RPM or SSD. What I ended up doing this morning was to hook up the SSD externally and choose to install Mavericks to that drive through my bootable USB. Than, once I booted successfully, I re-took the laptop apart, and put the SSD drive into the laptop. I didn't put the rail screws on this, I was just testing if it booted, so I just set it in the area it will reside. I booted and it wouldn't boot up at all, never saw Apple logo, just showed a blinking folder with quesiton mark on the screen.
If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd appreciate it, but now the internal drive connections don't seem to work, but I can boot externally for now. I figured I'd order the Hard Drive connector kit from ebay and see if that fixed it, since that is a 9 dollar part....
Thanks.

Mediasmart software problem loading onto computer with new hard drive and operating system

My computer recently crashed and I had to buy a new hard drive and operating system. None of the programs from the old hard drive were saved. The computer is an HP Pavilion dv7-3165dx Entertainment Notebook and I have Windows 7 Professional (64x) as the operating system. Tried to download Mediasmart from the HP Web page to play DVD and Blu-Ray Discs. The programs downloaded but will not install. Any suggestions?

waynesworld57 wrote:
My computer recently crashed and I had to buy a new hard drive and operating system. None of the programs from the old hard drive were saved. The computer is an HP Pavilion dv7-3165dx Entertainment Notebook and I have Windows 7 Professional (64x) as the operating system. Tried to download Mediasmart from the HP Web page to play DVD and Blu-Ray Discs. The programs downloaded but will not install. Any suggestions?
Hi,
It looks like it's a common issue: http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/TX-TM-Series-Notebooks-Reply-Only/HP-Mediasmart-Software-package-for-Wi...
Try VLC as a multimedia player: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html
Dv6-7000 /Full HD/Core i5-3360M/GF 650M/Corsair 8GB/Intel 7260AC/Samsung Pro 256GB
Testing - HP 15-p000
HP Touchpad provided by HP
Currently on Debian Wheeze
*Please, help other users with the same issue by marking your solved topics as "Accept as Solution"*

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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.

MacBook Pro: Swapping Hard Drives Between Two Identical Macs?

I have two Macbook Pro notebooks. They are both the June 11th 2012 models both with cd/dvd drives. They both have Mavericks installed on both.
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Can i just swap his 750HD from the 13 and put it into the 15? Can i also remove my 250 Samsung pro SSD from my 15 and put it in his 13?
What are some ways i can go about this that are easy?
Thanks in advance,
PS: Like i said they both run mavericks and they are the same generation MBP from June 2012 release from Apple. Except one is a 2.5 i5 13 inch and the other is a 15 inch 2.3 Quad i7.
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Thanks again.

nn007400,
are each of your laptops associated with your respective Apple IDs? If so, then that might be a fly in the ointment when it comes to updating apps purchased through the Mac App Store, if the tie-in involves your MacBook Pros’ serial numbers as well as your Apple IDs. (I don’t know whether that’s the case or not.)
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Swapping Hard Drives in Identical Systems

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