Is it possible to boot a cloned MacBook drive onto a Mac Mini and continue about my business?
March 26, 2009 10:10 AM Subscribe
Is it possible to boot a cloned MacBook drive onto a Mac Mini and continue about my business?
Alright, so I flew across the country yesterday and I left my MacBook at the TSA checkpoint. After much freaking out, I managed to get it located and am getting it overnighted back to me. Right now I'm poking along with my last backup on a Windows machine trying to cobble together enough things to get some work done. It got me to thinking about other ways to deal with a lack of my primary machine.. As standard procedure, I use carbon copy cloner on my Macbook to a firewire drive about once a month. Nightly I rsync everything from my Users directory. I have booted off the drive on my Macbook before and verified things work fine that way (actually, booting off the Firewire drive is faster than the internal drive.. ). I was wondering, if I picked up an Intel Mac Mini just as a spare machine, would I be able to just boot off of that external drive even though it is a clone of the Macbook and just keep on trucking? Would the OSX from the Macbook boot on the Mini via the cloned drive or would I then need to reinstall OSX with the Mini's copy to do what I'm thinking?
Alright, so I flew across the country yesterday and I left my MacBook at the TSA checkpoint. After much freaking out, I managed to get it located and am getting it overnighted back to me. Right now I'm poking along with my last backup on a Windows machine trying to cobble together enough things to get some work done. It got me to thinking about other ways to deal with a lack of my primary machine.. As standard procedure, I use carbon copy cloner on my Macbook to a firewire drive about once a month. Nightly I rsync everything from my Users directory. I have booted off the drive on my Macbook before and verified things work fine that way (actually, booting off the Firewire drive is faster than the internal drive.. ). I was wondering, if I picked up an Intel Mac Mini just as a spare machine, would I be able to just boot off of that external drive even though it is a clone of the Macbook and just keep on trucking? Would the OSX from the Macbook boot on the Mini via the cloned drive or would I then need to reinstall OSX with the Mini's copy to do what I'm thinking?
Best answer: Yep, done this myself a few times and it works really nicely.
posted by sektah at 11:31 AM on March 26, 2009
posted by sektah at 11:31 AM on March 26, 2009
Response by poster: Ah, good to know. I'm not wanting to migrate as this would be just for (hopefully) short term purposes in case my main Macbook dies (or I lose it again) before I can get it back or replace it. I figured this would probably work, but don't want to go get a Mini and then find out it won't.. Thanks!
posted by prggr at 12:01 PM on March 26, 2009
posted by prggr at 12:01 PM on March 26, 2009
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by now i'm piste at 10:14 AM on March 26, 2009