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Booting Mac Pro from 2nd internal drive

J

jfilm

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 21, 2015
8
1
New York, New York
Hi all,
I have a situation involving my editing software and needing to upgrade my OS. I'm running Lion on my Mac Pro early 2008, and using FCP 7. My question has to do with an older drive that I have installed in my tower. I took the original hard drive out of an older Mac Pro running Snow Leopard that had a kernel panic. So far that drive has worked as another drive on my computer (I installed it internally), but I've never tried to boot the computer from this drive. So, now I want to update Lion to at least Mountain Lion or El Capitan, but I'm worried that this might cause problems with FCP 7. I've been wondering what to do, and thought that maybe I could try booting the old Snow Leopard drive, and updating that, since FCP won't be affected. My question:

1. Is there a risk to booting from a drive that came from a computer that suffered a kernel panic? And this wasn't just one kernel panic- it was not fixed and never went away, so I retired the computer and bought another (used) mac pro. Could this somehow infect the other drive (my main drive) that is now running Lion?

Ideally it would be nice to have a newer OS on one drive and keep Lion as is, since FCP is working fine on it, and I'm in the middle of a project and I don't want it to get compromised. But I'm a bit worried that something could happen to the computer if I boot from the old drive.

Any thoughts? Thanks!
 
I doubt it could be "infected" that way, but it would really be helpful to know what the Kernel Panic text is.

If you want to be sure that your current HD is not affected by booting from the old one, you could pop the new one out temporarily, then boot to the old one and solve your KP issue. In fact there might be no KP at all, for example if the problem was being caused by faulty hardware in the old computer.
 
Unlike windows, I haven't heard of booting from different drives affecting other drives on Macs. Once the system targets which drive to boot from, all drivers it needs are all loaded from that and it doesn't touch the other. LIke ActionableMango mentioned, you can just pop the new one out and start with the old one and do whatever you need to do with it. If all goes well, you can just keep switching drives OR you can have your system target particular drives before you restart or during boot up (holding Option after the bong sound)
 
Thanks for the replies! That sounds like a good idea- I think I'll take the main drive out to be safe, and boot up from the old one. If it starts right up, I can then update that OS to El Capitan and then I'll have two OS's in the same tower.
 
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