Dummy question: Cloning a 2009 iMac to a 2009 Macbook Pro? Best way to do it?

JamesGR wrote:

Ugh. Another issue.

I went to clone with super duper and the iMac crashed. Then it wouldn’t boot. I tried repairing in disc utilities from the Snow Leopard DVD - the hd cannot be repaired.

Then I tried cloning by putting the iMac into target mode so it’s just an HD to copy.

No joy. It mounts and everything, but I can’t copy from there.

Any ideas?

Maybe I put a new HD in my iMac and restore from Time Machine?

I’m guessing restoring from a Time Machine to a 2009 MacBook with Snow Leopard wouldn’t work?!

I might have to give up!

You're going to need a system to boot the iMac from before you can restore a repaired iMac from Time Machine.

Both of your Macs are so old that they should have come with optical discs that you can use for reinstalling those Macs to "factory default" state. Hopefully you still have these discs, and remember which set of discs goes with which Mac (the discs might be model-specific).

You could try pulling stuff off of your Time Machine backup directly onto your MBP. If you are going to try overwriting your MBP's internal disk completely, I would suggest

• Making a bootable clone backup (or two) of your MBP's current system – for safety
• Then restoring the iMac's Time Machine backup to the MBP's internal drive
• Then upgrading to the final combo update of Snow Leopard (if you're not there already). Given the changes in https security since Snow Leopard's day, you would probably need to download it on a modern Mac or PC and transfer it via USB flash drive.

Apple Support – Mac OS X 10.6 Documentation (and links to updaters)

JamesGR wrote:

Ugh. Another issue.

I went to clone with super duper and the iMac crashed. Then it wouldn’t boot. I tried repairing in disc utilities from the Snow Leopard DVD - the hd cannot be repaired.

Then I tried cloning by putting the iMac into target mode so it’s just an HD to copy.

No joy. It mounts and everything, but I can’t copy from there.

Any ideas?

Your hard drive failure is probably worse than you realized. I'm not aware of any standard macOS app that can clone a failing hard drive since they are unable to deal with the I/O errors produced by a failing drive. The cloning apps CCC & SD are designed for healthy drives, even most data recovery apps are designed for healthy drives which had data accidentally deleted or erased....even macOS still gets in the way even if a utility is able to ignore errors. There is a way to perform a low level clone using a special command line utility that is designed to ignore errors, but it is tricky to use & best used while booted from a Linux drive. I posted instructions multiple times on this forum several years ago.

FYI, the more you use a failing drive, the worse the failure becomes where even a professional data recovery service will be unable to recover any data.

If you have a backup, then that would be the best option.

Use a cloning utility to transfer the data to an external drive. A very small number of the settings, such as the Energy Saver ones, won't be carried over, and some commercial software may refuse to run.

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JamesGR wrote:

An issue is that the iMac drive is on its way out and I sometimes have to recover it using disc utility.

I guess I should start by cloning that to an external SSD using a legacy version of Super Duper or something like that?

Sounds like you haven't been in the practice of making backups.

Unfortunately, now that your iMac drive "is on its way out", you might not be able to successfully make a clone backup. If you do have any existing backups, you may want to leave them untouched, and try copying recently changed files to a spare external drive, so that if your Mac fails / hangs in the middle of a backup operation, you aren't left with an incomplete / corrupt backup.

A clone may not work here if that is the factory OS. The factory OS only shipped with the drivers necessary for that specific computer. The laptop is a slightly later model & would likely need some other special drivers that are not present on the slightly older iMac. Back in the day it was possible to download an OSX update package which could be installed which included drivers for all systems, but I forget what that package was called. At that time Apple actually released to variations on their OSX update packages....one was just a simple & smaller update package & the other which included everything for all models. At least I think this was still done with Snow Leopard.

Perhaps if you find the OSX 10.6.8 update package which includes drivers for all Macs current at the time, then a clone will likely work assuming your worn out or failing hard drive is able to survive the stress of installing an OSX update package & clone.

Actually it would be safer to make the clone of the system as it is now. Then boot the older computer from the external clone drive & install the OSX 10.6.8 update which includes all drivers. This way you don't add more wear to a worn out or failing hard drive & you still get to update the OS safely without potentially breaking the current installation on the internal drive before using the clone on the other Mac.

If you are cloning the system, then you definitely want to use either Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper. I know CCC maintains links to download the older versions compatible with Snow Leopard (and that version was & still is free).

>Back in the day it was possible to download an OSX update package which could be installed which included drivers for all systems, but I forget what that package was called. At that time Apple actually released to variations on their OSX update packages....one was just a simple & smaller update package & the other which included everything for all models. At least I think this was still done with Snow Leopard.

Those packages are the Combo and Delta updates. They both contain all the drivers; the difference is that the Delta ones can only update the version immediately proceeding it. For example, the 10.6.8 Delta update can only update 10.6.7.

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Niel wrote:

Those packages are the Combo and Delta updates. They both contain all the drivers; the difference is that the Delta ones can only update the version immediately proceeding it. For example, the 10.6.8 Delta update can only update 10.6.7.

Thanks for clarifying.

Was it the same for the older MacOS 9 & earlier as well?

Apple only released one updater for each version and language; 9.0.4 and 9.1 will update any older version of that OS, while 9.2.1 and 9.2.2 required an earlier update to be installed or bundled. 9.2 wasn't released as an update.

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Yes.

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