MacOS – Moving Macbook Snow Leopard drive to a Macbook Pro that had Yosemite installed: kernel panic!

hard drivekernel-panicmacbook promacossnow leopard

My wife has a mid 2006 macbook that has been upgraded to snow leopard. I have a mid 2008 macbook pro that has been upgraded to Yosemite. I now want to give my macbook pro to my wife, and thought I could just swap in the drive from her macbook into the MBP (and then subsequently upgrade her to Yosemite). Swapping results in a kernel panic on the MBP; having done some reading, I suspect the problem is that somewhere along the way the MBP's firmware was upgraded such that it can no longer run snow leopard.

Since I can't (apparently) swap the drive in, what is the best way to move my wife's entire drive contents (i.e. apps, data, settings, whatever else) over to the MBP under Yosemite with as little fuss as possible? I have a cloned version of her macbook snow leopard drive available if that helps matters…

Best Answer

Thanks to those who responded to my question, but here's what I ended up doing:

  • Installed my wife's macbook/Snow Leopard drive in a caddy and attached it to another mac machine as an external drive
  • Downloaded the OS X Yosemite installer from the App Store and ran it with the external drive as the target
  • Attached the newly updated external drive to my Macbook Pro as an external drive and booted up off of it (booted up into startup manger mode - press and hold the option key after the powerup tone - and then selected the external drive as the bootup disk
  • removed the drive from the caddy and installed into the MBP

I'm not sure the third step is really necessary.

This all resulted in a Macbook Pro running Yosemite with all my wife's data/apps/etc in place with little fuss - my original goal :-)

(If anyone else is following this procedure, a reminder to effectively backup your data before starting! In my case that meant using Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive.)

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