My main MacBook Pro (mid-2010, Core i5) is in the shop and I happen to have a spare MBP (mid-2009, Core 2 Duo) here at the office. I pulled my drive before leaving my computer at the Apple Store for testing, which they say they're keeping for 5-7 days.
I think a lot of us have booted from other Mac's system disks before, but are there any potential long-term issues with swapping your main hard drive back and forth between machines? (Besides the obvious potential for physical damage, of course.)
I can imagine a whole range of issues that might crop up -- from things like stored encryption keys failing, to apps or services that look for unique machine IDs, like MAC addresses -- but if possible I'd really like to avoid drive duping, disk images, and incremental backups / transfers with a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner.
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What are the potential issues when moving your drive from one Mac to another?
Expect some trouble with services meant to be specific to one computer- this will probably be minor on OS X. You'll have to do the iTunes DRM authorization dance, confirm that you're OK re-homing your Time Machine backups to a new device, and possibly reinstall some third-party kernel extensions if they act up. This process is much more painful on Windows, since Genuine Advantage makes Windows and Office complain a lot more.
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For a hiatus as brief as this one, you probably won't see any substantial ill effects -- if it boots at all (which it should) chances are you will be fine. It can be more difficult if you are going from older hardware to newer, as in some cases the GPU support for the newer card won't be present on the old machine.
As Zeke notes, iTunes reauthorization may be an issue. I would avoid updating Time Machine if you can -- the TM identifiers are tied to the source disk UUID, not the motherboard, but it might still get hinky. A CCC or SuperDuper! backup once or twice during the swapped week should keep you covered.
As Zeke notes, iTunes reauthorization may be an issue. I would avoid updating Time Machine if you can -- the TM identifiers are tied to the source disk UUID, not the motherboard, but it might still get hinky. A CCC or SuperDuper! backup once or twice during the swapped week should keep you covered.
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I went through a somewhat similar situation, except I swapped my 2009 MacBook Pro drive into a 2007ish white MacBook (both running he latest Snow Leopard) and that resulted in audio not working, since the sound drivers are apparently different. Before I figured out how to fix it, the MBP was repaired though.
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Moving the drive isn't an issue so long as you go to a model equal or older than the original. If you intend to take the drive back to the original computer, you'll want to stay away from any software updates until you put it back to normal.
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You can put the drive in a 2,5" SATA USB enclosure. Then plug the drive into any Mac, hold option (alt) when booting and select the USB drive.
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I'm doing the same thing right now with the drive from my MBP that's in the shop. I popped my drive into a FireWire enclosure, plugged it into a newer Mac Pro at work, and booted into it. Everything is working perfectly. I'm typing on it right now.
Whenever I've done this in the past I've never run into any issues. I know you want to avoid it, but I highly recommend cloning it just once early on so that you'll have peace of mind in knowing you can always revert back to it if something really weird happens. Knowing that I have a week-old SuperDuper clone ready just-in-case definitely makes me feel better about doing this. Other than that, avoiding software installs and updates is probably a good idea as acasper said.
Thankfully, in my experience at least, Apple has always come through early with in-house repairs, so you probably won't have to deal with this for too long.
Whenever I've done this in the past I've never run into any issues. I know you want to avoid it, but I highly recommend cloning it just once early on so that you'll have peace of mind in knowing you can always revert back to it if something really weird happens. Knowing that I have a week-old SuperDuper clone ready just-in-case definitely makes me feel better about doing this. Other than that, avoiding software installs and updates is probably a good idea as acasper said.
Thankfully, in my experience at least, Apple has always come through early with in-house repairs, so you probably won't have to deal with this for too long.
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I have been using OS X since 10.04 and I have been moving drives between Macs (forward and backward in time) ever since and have never had the slightest issue. OS X includes all the drives for all the known hardware in every install, and it loads drivers dynamically at boot, so you should have nothing to fear. Sometimes, preferences for specific hardware might carry over where you didn't want them to, but I haven't even had that problem. Obviously, cloning your current install to another machine would be the same... it will work. Just go through System Preferences and double-check all the hardware-related preferences (especially networking and Bluetooth) to be totally sure nothing went crazy.
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