Dear WeatherCat Mac hardware experts,
NEWS FLASH!! The answer is no, you cannot just swap a hard drive from one Mac to another even if it is nominally the same version of OS-X See:
http://athena.trixology.com/index.php?board=21.0Other World Computing had a deal on used 17" MacBook Pros from early 2011 that I couldn't resist. The clincher is that they still can run . . . . . Snow Leopard!
Anyway, the new machine is due to arrive tomorrow and I would love to just pop my present SSD drive from my 2009 MacBook Pro and put it into the newer machine. Can I just plug the drive in and expect the newer MacBook Pro to work just fine?
The "safe" route is to make sure my time machine backup is complete, swap in the SSD drive, reformat it, install Snow Leopard from the DVD, and then migrate all my stuff from the backup.
However, Snow Leopard wouldn't have anything new that this newer MacBook Pro could take advantage of. Shouldn't all the code on my SSD work just fine on the newer hardware?
One inquiring mind would like to know!!
Cheers, Edouard
P.S. I just got myself on the private Beta testers list for the new version of Canvas for Mac. Perhaps my long Snow Leopard purgatory is soon going to end!!