Advice for swapping Hard Drive from old to new macbook

[eme jota ce]

I just upgraded from a 2.0Ghz Core Duo macbook to a 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo wiht the 802.11n card.

I have a nice 120GB 7200rpm drive in the old macbook, which is better than the new computer's drive.

Can I just pull the hard drive from my old macbook and stick it into the new mackbook without causing any performance problems?

In other words, does the drive store info. that was optimized for the Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo setup? (That may be a bad example, but it's just a Noob way of trying to give a specific example of the type of concerns I ignorantly fear.)

Thanks,
mjc

 

[filmgirl]

I just upgraded from a 2.0Ghz Core Duo macbook to a 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo wiht the 802.11n card.

I have a nice 120GB 7200rpm drive in the old macbook, which is better than the new computer's drive.

Can I just pull the hard drive from my old macbook and stick it into the new mackbook without causing any performance problems?

In other words, does the drive store info. that was optimized for the Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo setup? (That may be a bad example, but it's just a Noob way of trying to give a specific example of the type of concerns I ignorantly fear.)

Thanks,
mjc

It's different hardware. I mean, you could conceivably do something via Target Disk Mode/SuperDuper - but really, the easiest thing is to pop out the 120 GB drive, put it in the new MacBook, boot-up the OS X DVD that came with the new MacBook and run a clean install. Then you can use Target Disk Mode/SuperDuper/Firewire/whatever to restore you files.

You might have to reinstall some stuff this way and redo your settings, but in the long run this is going to be much, much easier than trying to do it the other way.

Edit to add: As far as backing up the original info on the drive -- what you want to do is first transfer the stuff to the new Mac via Target Disk mode or whatever. Then after you install the old drive in the new Mac, connect the old Mac/new drive via Target Disk Mode (this way the OS doesn't get confused by the non-matching hardware specs) to transfer back.

Of course, if you can do stuff to DVD, that will save a lot of hassle too.

 

[dacreativeguy]

It's different hardware. I mean, you could conceivably do something via Target Disk Mode/SuperDuper - but really, the easiest thing is to pop out the 120 GB drive, put it in the new MacBook, boot-up the OS X DVD that came with the new MacBook and run a clean install. Then you can use Target Disk Mode/SuperDuper/Firewire/whatever to restore you files.

You might have to reinstall some stuff this way and redo your settings, but in the long run this is going to be much, much easier than trying to do it the other way.

Edit to add: As far as backing up the original info on the drive -- what you want to do is first transfer the stuff to the new Mac via Target Disk mode or whatever. Then after you install the old drive in the new Mac, connect the old Mac/new drive via Target Disk Mode (this way the OS doesn't get confused by the non-matching hardware specs) to transfer back.

Of course, if you can do stuff to DVD, that will save a lot of hassle too.

It would be much easier to 1. clone your old computer to an external firewire drive with SuperDuper or CCC, 2. Swap the physical drives, 3. Erase and Install on the new computer, 4. During setup, when the migration screen comes up, plug in the external firewire drive and migrate.

When it is all over, you have a new computer with all your data, an old computer you can sell, and an external drive that you can use to keep your data backed up. It's worth it.

 

[eme jota ce]

Thanks to you both for your replies.

I don't know what approach I'll take, but it seems that you are both advising against just plopping the old drive into the new machine.

The old drive has an ecrypted disk image as one of the users, which won't transfer via Migration. It's probably too full for me to unencrypt it. Because I'm imagining a long series of copies / transfers / unencryptions / retransfers... any idea what my risks are for just plopping the old drive into the new machine?