Boot From Old Drive In Newer Mac Pro

You can put the Snow Leopard drive in the 2010 Mac Pro and boot from it. It will work very well. Note that you will need to remove the Snow Leopard drive from its current 2006 drive sled and install it in a drive sled from the 2010 Mac Pro. Not sure why this isn’t recommended, according to a kaz-k. I have run Snow Leopard on my 2010 Mac Pro since I got it. The caveat might be security: you should avoid using the older browsers that work with Snow Leopard.

Contrary to what was stated, I can assure everyone from my own personal experience that you CAN install Snow Leopard on a 2010 Mac Pro using the retail Snow Leopard DVD.

The 2010 Mac Pro came with Snow Leopard (10.6.4 in fact) which is one of the macOSes I recommend.

Sierra is the other and the Mac Pro will be happy running that.

I'd be wary though of using a drive that has been setup for one model Mac in another. Apple may well have tailored the installation to the hardware at the point of installation.

Cant hurt to try it however as an external drive using the option boot method to switch and see what happens.

Peter

I don’t think there is any reason to be concerned about moving drives between Mac Pro models. I moved two drives from my 2010 Mac Pro into my 2006 Mac Pro after I had replaced them in the 2010 with bigger drives. They work perfectly. Both were Snow Leopard systems, one of which has since been ”upgraded” to Lion in the 2006 machine. No issues as long as you use the appropriate drive sled.

The only restriction is when you use a MacOS image that "shipped in the box" with a new Mac (even after software update). It ONLY contains drivers for that model Mac.

Any "Purchased" version contains "Drivers for every appropriate model Mac" and as long as that version is as new as the minimum required for the second Mac, it should work fine.

Yeah, software licenses can be a problem, especially if the license limits use to one machine. (I avoid software that is that restrictive.) Ideally, you’d deactivate those apps/licenses on the old machine before transferring the drive to the new machine. Glad it all worked.

One thing to keep in mind is that when you are running Snow Leopard, you won’t see the Sierra drive in your Startup Disk preference panel in System Prefs. You will need to restart with the option key pressed, to bring up the list of bootable drives.

A further advantage to running those two OS versions is that you can use Snow Leopard’s Disk Utility to format hard drives. Yet another reason that I still have Snow Leopard installed.

Hi,

You can't boot from retail Snow Leopard DVD, though you could boot from Snow Leopard installed HDD.

Try it, it doesn't hurt anything.

It is not recommended, though.

Same here, at work we moved drives from machine to machine without issue, MB's to MBP's to Mini's, made no difference they all booted just fine.

Seems like the OP should be safe with a Snow Leopard drive from the 2006? The disks that shipped with the 2006 were Intel Tiger disks.

kahjot

I agree. A 10.6 version running on a 2006 model must be a "purchased" version. As long as it is fully upgraded to 10.6.8, it should work fine.