Access to old iMac Harddisk

Ali_powerofnow wrote:

Thanks again for your reply. Actually I have been learning with it, however, the question was; I have just bought Mac mini 1TB HD and Screen and when i setup this, I have the intention, to take my SSD HD out from my old IMAC and put it to a Harddisk drive/box and to be able to access it on this way. I wonder whether it will as my computer access password which I used to enter always when i had started my iMac or not.

Performing surgery on an iMac to get to its drive(s) is not for the faint of heart.

Some iMac SSDs were had a 2.5" SATA notebook form factor, and others were on circuit board sticks.. I don't know if all of the circuit board sticks were standard enough to work in third-party external enclosures. If there were no compatible SSD upgrades from OWC for your model, that might be a bad omen …

If your startup disk is a Fusion Drive – which combines a small SSD with a much larger HDD – then it would be very undesirable to remove the SSD from the iMac before you had backed up or transferred the data. (Taking either drive out would break the Fusion Drive in half, and you would have two incomplete "corrupted" pieces.)

I'm guessing that the old Mac is not recent enough to have an Apple T2 Security chip. Moving the drive from one of those to an external enclosure would separate the drive from the encryption keys stored inside the T2, making the drive unreadable.

Mac models with the Apple T2 Security Chip - Apple Support

All things considered, if the old iMac is in working condition, you should give strong consideration to

• Using Target Disk Mode, or
• Getting an external hard drive, backing up the old iMac's internal drive to it, then copying your data from that external disk to your new computer.

Ali_powerofnow wrote:

Not it is not soldered. Actually I put it in some years ago. I have bought the proper case yesterday and it will arrive in the next days. The question in my mind is; it used to be the main disk in my iMac 27 inch. I am worried that it has on it the “not working” Monterey software + it asks me every time of my password to start up. I wonder, how such disk will react when it is all of a sudden in an external disk case and connected to a Mac as a “external HD”

If the old iMac is just asking for a login password, the system might not enforce file access permissions when you put the drive into an external enclosure, and use it as a second drive (not the startup drive).

If you were using FileVault on your old Mac, see:

Encrypt Mac data with FileVault - Apple Support

If that drive formatting is the ancient HFS and not HFS+, then the drive will not be accessible by macOS Ventura, if that is the operating system you are using. You can determine the formatting by performing a Finder Get Info on that hard drive icon.

It should be possible assuming the SSD isn't soldered in & you can find a case that works for Apple's SSD.

Possibly, but all data on an SSD can disappear in an instant.

See if Target Disk Mode works...

Transfer files between two Mac computers using target disk mode - Apple Support

Click on the blue link above in my post.

Was it asking for the PW because you used FileVault encryption

It should.