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Can I load an image of my iMac which ran Snow Leopard onto a new iMac which runs Mountain Lion?

I have just moved to the United States from Australia.


When I was in Australia I took an image of my iMac hard drive, which I bought in 2010, the OS was Snow Leopard and I use Pro Tools 8 and some other pieces of software and data which are all set up properly on that machine. Pro Tools 8 does not work on any OS later than Snow Leopard, so I really would like to have this computer run just like my computer did in Australia.


Therefore, I have been trying to replace the hard drive on my new iMac with the data from the image of my old hard drive from my iMac in Australia, replace it exactly if possible.


I called apple care a couple of times and have been to the apple store also and I'm getting conflicting information about whether this is possible or not. Can I do this? I have tried booting with "apple+r' and I was almost going to replace the hard drive with the disk that comes up on my portable hard drive from Australia, but I don't really know what I'm doing.


Any advice please?


Thanks.

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8)

Posted on Sep 23, 2012 2:54 PM

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Posted on Sep 23, 2012 2:57 PM

My guess is no but, put the old drive in an external case, plug into the new Mac and see if you can boot. Do it this way as replacing the drive in an iMac is no small task.


If it boots then you know the answer.

53 replies

Sep 23, 2012 3:13 PM in response to Csound1

Cool, thanks.


How do I boot from it?


I have the old drive (which is an image of my Australian computer) in a case and plugged into my computer.


I've booted pressing apple+r and then gone to disk utility. It comes up as "disk1" with things on it, I can go to "restore" put "disk1" in source and then "Macintosh HD" but I am reluctant to go ahead incase it does something crazy that I don't understand. Is this what I should be doing?


In any case, I will be taking it to Genius Bar tomorrow and see what they can do for me.

Sep 23, 2012 3:24 PM in response to twistiejoe

twistiejoe wrote:


Awesome, thanks. I rebooted just like you said, it comes up as another drive that I can boot from. Is that a good sign? I'm not sure what to do from here but I suppose I'll find out tomorow at the genius bar. Thanks again.

Select it and boot, the worst that can happen is that it won't boot so you have nothing to lose. If it does boot you're done, back to work for you 🙂

Sep 23, 2012 3:34 PM in response to twistiejoe

That means that your iMac can not boot from the SL system unfortunately, but better than taking the iMac apart to fit the disk and then finding out. Now you have choices, Snow Leopard is not going to run on your new machine so ...... upgrade your sofware? is that a possibility?


You can (of course) copy any and all data from the drive, but applications will have to be compliant with the new OS.

Sep 23, 2012 3:37 PM in response to RRFS

RRFS wrote:


Create a seperate Partition on your Hard Drive and then install the Image there. You will have a seperate Boot Volume that you can use with the "Option" key during startup (just like you did now but much faster). 😉

Snow Leopard will not run on his system (wrong hardware drivers) it does not matter whether on an internal or external disc.


Scratch that, just realized this is an image rather than a clone, apologies, and to the OP follow this advice if you have space on the internal drive to set enough aside for Snow Leopard.

Can I load an image of my iMac which ran Snow Leopard onto a new iMac which runs Mountain Lion?

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