Recently, I had to upgrade from my originaly MBP (2007) to a new, 15in MBP with Lion. I was able to extract my old hard drive from my old computer and load it onto my new laptop, it reads the drive fine and acknowledges there are 110GBs of files on it but when I click in the folders nothing appears and everything is 0 bytes.
Is the problem the platform that each computer had, the old hd was OSX 10.6 and this one is Mountain Lion? Also, when I went to Disk Utility to try and Repair the disk it went through everything successfully but when it tried to unmount it at the end of the process it failed. To Unmount it I had to Force Eject it, does any of this make sense?
Best Answer
Perhaps its the way you're wording it, but it probably would have been easier to connect the laptops together in target disk mode (hold T when turning on the old macbook), assuming you have the correct cables. It should then appear as an external drive on the new macbook.
Anyway, Mtn Lion should read the drive without issue as 10.6 uses the same native mac filesystem as 10.7 and 10.8 (journaled hfs). Are you able to use terminal to list files? Perhaps it's an issue with Finder taking forever to list the directory. I would try Disk Utility again or run fsck -fy on the volume to force a filesystem check if you know that the old drive is in good working order.