Migrating a HD from a MBP to a MB
Over the next few weeks, we need my MacBook Pro for some customer research work we’re doing. Rather than trying to migrate all of my data, settings, and applications onto another machine, I pulled the hard drive using the great walkthroughs at ifixit.com and dropped it into an older MacBook Black.
As expected, it booted right up, and I’m largely back in business. Total elapsed time for the switchover: about 8 minutes. There are a few things I still need to take care of, however:
- iTunes wants me to reauthorize
- Creative Suite 4 wants me to reauthorize
- I had to re-pair my bluetooth keyboards (but not the mice)
- iWork is giving me the welcome screens, although it’s still registered
- MobileMe stopped syncing Address Book, Calendar, Bookmarks, and my iDisk
I’m thinking that once I get the new 500GB into the MBP, I’ll try the following trick to move my authorizations:
- Reboot the MB into firewire target mode, and plug it into the MBP
- Boot the MBP holding down the Option key, and select the firewire drive
- Log into my account and deauthorize iTunes and Adobe CS
- Shutdown both machines
- Reboot the MB into normal mode, login, and authorize iTunes and CS4
Wish me luck. If this all fails, I’m going to have to do some surgery on the machines again to get my original HD back into the MBP to do the deauthorizations. In the meanwhile, must resist urge to sync my iPhone with the (now deauthorized) iTunes.
Update: well, that worked. I was able to get the deauthorizations to work using the firewire disk mode I described above and restarted syncing in MobileMe, and now I’m pretty much good to go on the MB.
