rebooting MBA from old MB HD, possible or not?

G

guapagirl

Registered
I had a bit of a disaster with my old MB (running snow leopard) and managed to get the HD out to save some vital stuff by plugging it into the replacement MBA (on lion). There are some things on the old HD that I'd like to do though and so I tried plugging it in, restarting with the option key pressed and tried to choose the now external HD as the boot disk (I'm hoping I have the terminology right!). However nothing happened. The MBA just froze and I had to shut it down and disconnect the HD.

Am I attempting the impossible or am I just doing it wrong? any advice appreciated.

Thanks, Liz
 
Sometimes that'll work, sometimes not. The problem may stem from the fact that the hard drive contains a Snow Leopard installation that may not include all the drivers for the newer MacBook Air, and so it's failing to boot.

Are there things on the old hard drive that you need and can just copy to the MBA and continue working on? Or do you have specific programs and applications on the old hard drive that require you to actually boot into the Snow Leopard system to use and get done?
 
Hi ElDiablo, thanks for the response. I have programmes on the old MB. I'll try and boot from the iMac. That is on snow leopard as well, so might work...
 
I'm assuming you have the old drive plugged into some kind of SATA/USB adapter? That won't boot the MBA because as a rule of thumb newer Macs won't boot versions of OSX that are older than the machine. However, just having the MBA booted normally and the old HD connected via USB, the MBA should see that drive. Then you can just use migration assistant to move everything over from the old drive including applications, user accounts, and settings.
 
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