How do you boot a Mac Pro hardrive as an external drive on an iMac?

Question

Gem Horton Author

Level 1

5 points

How do you boot a Mac Pro hardrive as an external drive on an iMac?

Hi All,

I hope you can help me.

I have a Mac Book Pro. The mother board has died but the hard drive is still working fine according to the technicians.

I decided not to repair the Mac Book Pro as its quite old and I wanted a bigger screen so I got a new iMac.

The problem is when the Mac Book Pro died there were two files on the desktop that I had not backed up.

I know its not a massive problem. But my curiosity has made me wonder if it is possible to plug the Mac Book Pro into the iMac and boot the Mac Book Pro's hard disk as an external disk on the iMac so I can recover the files.

I'm sure it must be possible. But how?

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Gem

MacBook Pro, iOS 4.3.2

Posted on Mar 8, 2015 2:20 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 8, 2015 2:25 PM in response to Gem Horton

From what you have said about the disk drive coming from an older Mac, my initial response is no. The odds are that the version of OS X and the drivers on the disk drive from the old MBP will not be able boot the new iMac.

But do you really need to boot from the old disk drive or just gather the data from it?

If all you need is the data that should be doable by putting the disk drive in an external enclosure and connecting it to the iMac.

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Answer 2

baltwo

Level 9

62,362 points

Mar 8, 2015 3:23 PM in response to Gem Horton

Put the MBP into target disk mode. If that works, hook it up to the iMac and copy what you need from the HD. You might need to get an Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter and maybe a FireWire 400 to 800 Adapter to connect the two.

27" i7 iMac (Mid 2011) refurb, OS X Yo (10.10.2), Mavs, ML & SL, G4 450 MP w/10.5 & 9.2.2

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