Booting from another Mac?

Here is my question. If I have a backup image of my hard drive, say from SuperDuper, for my MacBookPro and that machine dies. Can I put that disk image on my MacBook, and using Target Disk Mode somehow boot my MacBook Pro from my MacBook and get back to work. I realize that I wouldn't be able to use my MacBook in the meantime, but that is not important.

I don't think you can. Most of the binaries you have are for the MBP and not the MB.

rman said:

I don't think you can. Most of the binaries you have are for the MBP and not the MB.

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But the image would be made from the MBP, just on the MB as a mounted image.

The problem is that you created the image from the MBP and not a MB. Some of the binaries that are need for the MB are not part of the MBP image. Whereas if you had an image for the MB, you would not be able to place it on a MBP.

You best bet, is to ensure you make regular back ups of your data. Which is more important than the operating system. You can recreate the operating system, but you can not recreate some of your data.

The only way you can boot one Mac off another is if you put one of the Macs into Firewire target disc mode.

That won't let you select disk images to mount before booting though, so you would only be able to boot your MBP using the MB's regular OS X install (which will probably not work as rman mentioned).

You could repartition your MB's harddrive to have one boot partition and one partition that has a full image backup of your MBP's drive.
Then you would be able to select both images in target disk mode and boot off the image you created of your MBP's drive.

However, it seems a lot easier just to get a proper external backup drive.

Aptmunich said:

The only way you can boot one Mac off another is if you put one of the Macs into Firewire target disc mode.

That won't let you select disk images to mount before booting though, so you would only be able to boot your MBP using the MB's regular OS X install (which will probably not work as rman mentioned).

You could repartition your MB's harddrive to have one boot partition and one partition that has a full image backup of your MBP's drive.
Then you would be able to select both images in target disk mode and boot off the image you created of your MBP's drive.

However, it seems a lot easier just to get a proper external backup drive.

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Interesting. You might be on to something. I am not in love with external hard drives for a very simple reason. I have a home network, with a couple of servers, which are not Macs. In all, I have 5 computers. Having external hard drives for all isn't a good solution because it ends up being wasted space, plus there is no redundancy. So instead I have a central backup server with RAID and a lot of space. So I can keep all my computers backed up in one place.

The downside to this with my main computer (MBP) is that if my hard drive dies, I can't use it until I replace m hard drive (because I don't have an external drive). My planned alternative would be to get an external drive just to use for this situation. But I have a MacBook as well. My MB is a secondary computer that I use when I travel or sometimes when I want something small and light. I don't need it all the time and so it's kind of an extra machine. So I was thinking an alternative to buying an extra hard drive would be to just use my extra computer.

Let me say this, I have no problems formatting my MacBook and imaging it with my SuperDuper clone of my MBP, then using it in Target Disk Mode to boot from. I can wipe my MacBook if I need to use it for this, but I was wondering if this is actually possible.

Well, if you want to go that route then I see two options:

a) Use your Macbook as a permanent external drive:
Simply restore the MBP to the MB in target mode with Superduper.

Drawbacks: You won't be able to use the MB itself.

b) Create 2 partitions on the Macbook:
One for the MB to boot, one for the MBP to target boot.
It's fairly easy to do with Disk Utility and would give you the most flexibility should your MBP ever run into issues that are not just limited to the disk.

Drawbacks: You can't use all of the MB's harddrive as backup space.

I know some of our developers at work actually keep a copy of the latest OS X seed on a separate partition to use as a restore / install drive whenever they need to test things out with the latest seeds...

Aptmunich said:

Well, if you want to go that route then I see two options:

a) Use your Macbook as a permanent external drive:
Simply restore the MBP to the MB in target mode with Superduper.

Drawbacks: You won't be able to use the MB itself.

b) Create 2 partitions on the Macbook:
One for the MB to boot, one for the MBP to target boot.
It's fairly easy to do with Disk Utility and would give you the most flexibility should your MBP ever run into issues that are not just limited to the disk.

Drawbacks: You can't use all of the MB's harddrive as backup space.

I know some of our developers at work actually keep a copy of the latest OS X seed on a separate partition to use as a restore / install drive whenever they need to test things out with the latest seeds...

Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. It sounds like I will just pick up an external enclosure and use a spare hard drive.