It's a long story, but, several weeks ago, our early-2011 version of the MBP started exhibiting the well-documented dedicated AMD GPU hardware malfunction issue. In our case, it was the white and pink vertical stripes, but I've read about several other symptoms that indicate the same hardware failure.
At this point, we've taken delivery of single-bay Thunderbolt 1 (TB1) "enclosure" that will allow us to clone the HDD (and the El Capitan version of OS X ) that presently resides on the 750GB HDD inside this machine.
We received the TB1 external drive enclosure, equipped with a 2TB Samsung SSD, from an extremely busy friend. As I'm sure that he was in rush to get back to work, it came with quite a bit of data on it and, more to the point, the "Volume" label is as follows: Install macOS High Sierra. As I don't wish to disturb my friend any more than I already have, I'm wondering if, by activating the 5.24 GB "High Sierra" application file on the external drive, it will want to install itself on the external SSD or on the HDD we use to operate our MBP?
As the ultimate goal is the safe cloning of the HDD on the MBP 17, would it hurt anything to copy the High Sierra install file to our HDD, format the external SSD and, after that, use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything on the HDD, including the High Sierra install file, onto the formatted SSD?
Although we have updated the OS X on the MBP 17 several times over the years, we did so via update notices we receive directly from Apple. No one here has any experience with cloning HDDs, either, so we're trying to proceed with caution...
At this point, we've taken delivery of single-bay Thunderbolt 1 (TB1) "enclosure" that will allow us to clone the HDD (and the El Capitan version of OS X ) that presently resides on the 750GB HDD inside this machine.
We received the TB1 external drive enclosure, equipped with a 2TB Samsung SSD, from an extremely busy friend. As I'm sure that he was in rush to get back to work, it came with quite a bit of data on it and, more to the point, the "Volume" label is as follows: Install macOS High Sierra. As I don't wish to disturb my friend any more than I already have, I'm wondering if, by activating the 5.24 GB "High Sierra" application file on the external drive, it will want to install itself on the external SSD or on the HDD we use to operate our MBP?
As the ultimate goal is the safe cloning of the HDD on the MBP 17, would it hurt anything to copy the High Sierra install file to our HDD, format the external SSD and, after that, use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything on the HDD, including the High Sierra install file, onto the formatted SSD?
Although we have updated the OS X on the MBP 17 several times over the years, we did so via update notices we receive directly from Apple. No one here has any experience with cloning HDDs, either, so we're trying to proceed with caution...
