Q: Migration from SATA drive to iMac
Four days ago, my MacPro (2010) died. I have four 3” SATA drives of 1-2 TB each from the Mac Pro. The computer was for business and personal use. Absolutely everything (including financial data) I have is on those four drives including redundant copies of some files as well as my Time Machine backup.
I will have an enclosure coming tomorrow that is a RAID enclosure but will be be run in the Independent Drive Mode with the four drives. My “new” computer is an iMac (2013) I was given. The iMac and the primary SATA drive are running the same version of OS. I need to resolve this quickly so I can back to work. In the short term, I plan to operate off the primary SATA drive to catch up, then transfer when I have a convenient time to transfer.
My question is the best way to get the entire contents of the primary SATA drive onto the iMac hard drive. I want everything that is on the primary SATA drive from the Mac Pro put to be on the iMac (including prefs and hidden files) so it would be the same as when I booted the Mac Pro.
Do I use migration utility, clone the primary SATA drive to the iMac, or even use the Time Machine backup?
If I clone the drive, I know I would have to boot off a drive other than the iMac drive to clone to the iMac. When the primary SATA drive is attached I would need to boot from it by holding down the option key at startup to select the startup drive.
If I use Migration Utility, it appears I would boot the iMac and then run the utility to the iMac from the SATA drive array that would be connected to the iMac. Would this replace all the information on the iMac even though it was the boot drive?
I have printed out the information on Migration from Apple Mac help when transferring from an other storage device, but it is not completely clear to me.
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), 2.7 GHz, 8 GB, 4 external drives
Posted on Sep 12, 2016 9:18 PM