Take drive out of iMac and boot a Mac mini with it

[octomac]

My iMac died and pulled the 3tb drive out of it. Put it in a mini stack max enclosure and hooked it up to my Mac mini via usb3. The drive is not seen when I hold down option on start. Once I boot the drive can be seen and I can even set it as my startup disk but it won't boot off of that.

Are the iMac and mini boot drives compatible?

 

[Spink10]

hmm - not the same. But recently I took out a SSD from my cMBP and placed it in my Mac Mini and everything worked right away.

 

[octomac]

Both machines are on Yosemite for what it's worth.

 

[octomac]

Quick update ... When drive is connected with fw800 it will boot and run. Not sure why usb3 is not working.

 

[octomac]

A few more notes for people that might have this same issue in the future. I bought Seagate backup plus 4tb drive and it was not recognized at boot time even after formatting it. I did a clean install of yosemite on it and it was found at boot up and seemed to perform well however this drive has a built it fan which is annoying so its going back to costco.

I have still not been able to get the old mac mini drive to boot in the mini stack max when using usb3. I bought this at the other world computing garage sale and it is not refundable so I guess its headed to ebay soon. Anyone considering this enclosure should think twice. The fan is pretty loud compared to the mini.

My next step is to try a pluggable usb3 lay flat dock to see if that will boot my old drive. Not sure where to go after that.

 

[jbarley]

I have several cheap USB3 enclosures ($19) LOGiiX, these have always worked well as boot drives.
Your pluggable usb3 lay flat dock should function just fine.

A few more notes for people that might have this same issue in the future. I bought Seagate backup plus 4tb drive and it was not recognized at boot time even after formatting it. I did a clean install of yosemite on it and it was found at boot up and seemed to perform well however this drive has a built it fan which is annoying so its going back to costco.

I have still not been able to get the old mac mini drive to boot in the mini stack max when using usb3. I bought this at the other world computing garage sale and it is not refundable so I guess its headed to ebay soon. Anyone considering this enclosure should think twice. The fan is pretty loud compared to the mini.

My next step is to try a pluggable usb3 lay flat dock to see if that will boot my old drive. Not sure where to go after that.

 

[Fishrrman]

There are -some- external docks and enclosures "out there" that just don't seem to support booting in all circumstances.

Almost all do, but now and then one stumbles onto a combination that just "won't work". This probably has something to do with the controller board or controller chip on the device.

I had that problem with an OWC "Voyager" USB2/firewire docking station. It would boot in USB mode, but if I tried connecting it via Firewire to one of my Macs, it just wouldn't boot...