How can I salvage projects from an old hard drive?

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Level 1

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How can I salvage projects from an old hard drive?

I had a Macbook Pro that had iMovie '11, 9.0.9. I had several projects underway that had not yet been finalized, and then one day I spilled water on my laptop and destroyed it, except for the hard drive. I now have a new macbook air with iMovie 10.1.1. I have converted the hard drive from my old macbook Pro into an external hard drive, and I would like to somehow take my old projects off of that hard drive and convert or transfer them to my new computer in a way that allows me to access/work on them. The project files are still in their original location on the old hard drive, but I have not been able to figure out a way to open them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

iMovie '11, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Feb 2, 2016 8:10 PM

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Answer 1

GeeD

Level 6

9,179 points

Feb 3, 2016 2:39 AM in response to mrhallbc

The easiest is to use Migration Assistant to transfer data from your old startup drive to your new Mac? See: Move your content to a new Mac - Apple Support

Your old iMovie 9 folders should be automatically transferred and you may be able to launch iMovie 9 (I'm not sure about this since iMovie 9 does not work well under El Capitan). Otherwise launching iMovie 10 should result in an offer to update the iMovie 9 folders.

If you don't or can't use Migration Assistant then you have to find the iMovie Projects and iMovie Events folders on the old startup drive. You will find them under Users / <your name> /Movies.

Copy them both into the Movies folder on your new computer's drive and launch iMovie (10). It should see the folders and ask if you want to update them.

This should work OK if your clips were originally imported directly from a camera, camera memory card or from files you put on the computer with the finder.

If you used content from other application libraries like iTunes or iPhoto, the originals will not be in the iMovie 9 folders but in these application libraries and will show as missing in your new iMovie library. It is possible to transfer and update iTunes and iPhoto libraries from the old machine but I would doubt whether the links to the clips from the new iMovie library to your clips would still work.

Geoff.

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