trying to save former hard drive

I have an new mac book pro. I have taken the hard drive out of my old mac and placed it into an external enclosure. The new mac reacts to the old hard drive claim it cannot read it, disk utility see it as /dev/disk1s1, but first aid has no buttons active, I cannot verify it or repair it. I think that because the partition map scheme is "Master Boot Record" it is impossible for the new mac to see it! Can anyone suggest how to either use this disk like a normal external or possibly boot the new mac from the external hard drive>>>???

put the hard drive back in your old mac. start it up. if it starts up and loads fine, tell it to reboot into target disk mode. you can then connect the macs via fire wire and transfer all your old stuff you want to keep. After that, you can start your old mac with the mac os.x install disks and format the old hard drive to be empty space or mac journaled. take out the old hard drive, put it in the usb thing, and format it with your new mac.
there is probably an easier way to do all this, but i dont know.

good luck!

sackandcrack,
Thanks for the info, however, problem is, I can't power up the old mac. Something wrong is the switch arena, that's why the new mac was purchased. Do you know anyother way to boot from the external drive?

you can try to plug in the usb drive and then when your mac boots up, try holding option down. That is how you pick which start up disk you want to use. problem is that if your mac cannot see the disk, it probably cannot boot from it. if anyone else you know has a mac, try to see if their mac can see it. if it shows up in the disk utility, you might be able to erase it and start over from scratch, but kiss all your apps and files goodbye. you could also put your mac os.x install disk in, reboot and hold "c" down when the screen comes on. this will make the mack boot from the dvd and you can access disk utilities from there. i dont think this will help, but it might be worth a shot. google is your friend; there are several articles about how to make a usb bootable with the mac, but i never tried this except with linux<which is super easy by the way>.