Boot from USB to clone an unbootable drive?

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Boot from USB to clone an unbootable drive?

My 2015 Macbook Pro has died - I think it's a logic board failure and I want to try to recover the data from the drive. Unfortunately it is a 16+6 proprietary fitting (SSD) and the cheapest external enclosure for it is slightly more than I want to pay.

My son has a 2014 MBP with the same SSD fitting but obviously his machine won't boot from my SSD (I tried it!)

What I'm wondering is, if I made a bootable USB drive, would I be able to put my SSD in his machine, boot from the external drive and then save my data?

Thanks

MacBook Pro, OS X 10.11

Posted on Aug 31, 2023 4:23 AM

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Answer 1

★ Helpful

Limnos

Community+ 2023

Level 10

405,606 points

Aug 31, 2023 4:48 AM in response to gavspav

Which mac OS versions are being used? It sounds like it might work as long as theire isn't any other incompatibility that using different system versions produces such as having APFS formatting on the drive but using an OS version that needs HFS.

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Answer 2

★ Helpful

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

124,507 points

Aug 31, 2023 8:07 AM in response to gavspav

Consider accessing the non-working Mac's drive using Target Disk Mode. This allows the drive to appear on another Mac as if it were locally connected.

The software to support target disk mode is in the wounded Mac's ROM, and does not need to boot up MacOS to be usable as such a drive.

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

I do not recommend cloning the drive, because around 40 GB of stuff on that drive is MacOS itself, which is NOT self-modifying, and can be re-installed in an EXACT replica in a few hours.

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