A tricky one... hard drive wont boot

[richthomp]

Bear with me while I explain this...

I have a macbook unibody (2008). I replaced the hard drive earlier this year with a Seagate MOMENTUS XT, 500GB, 7200RPM - it's a hybrid. Going great.

Now, I just bought a macbook pro and wanted to replace the hard drive it came with with my Seagate. However, when I turn it on I get the 'no drive' sign. The drive it came with works great and (here is where it gets weird) when I hold down 'option' the seagate shows up as a drive - in other words it is connected.

I can't figure this one out. At first I thought it was the cable, but the fact that the drive is recognized but wont load says to me that the cable is working fine.

So... can anyone solve this for me?

PS - both are running OS 10.7.4

[unclemac]

98% sure that the issue is the new chipset in the latest Mac Hardware. Even though you are running 10.7.4 on both, there will be some key software components missing if the OS on the drive was installed on any older Mac (like your MacBook). Kind of a pain, but this is common when new Macs come out, with new chipsets, video cards, etc. The older installers simply are not complete, so you need a new one.

Since new Macs don't ship with installer disks, you have to be a little creative. Ways to fix:

1. 10.7 Recovery. Pretty sure you can do this without formatting the drive, but always backup everything important first.

2. Manual. Clone the drive you want to keep to another volume. Erase the Hybrid, Install clean version of 10.7 via Recovery. Booted to Clean OS, use the Migration Assistant to migrate data automatically to the new OS.

3. Manual. Clone the OS off the original HD that came with the new Mac to the Hybrid. Obviously this means formatting the Hybrid first, but you could clone the Hybrid, erase, clone OS to it, and then run MA to restore data and apps.


If you don't want to have to do this again......you can create your own installer so next time it is quick and painless.

[richthomp]

Good call - it was the software being created on the older mac.

My problem though is that if I use migration assistant I loose all my licenses (esp of my adobe software) so I am trying to figure another way around it.

Let me know if you have any more thoughts!