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How to transfer data from your old computer to a new Yosemite Mac

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Reader Walt Pinkston has an impatient friend who was a little too anxious to put old data on a new Mac. He writes:</p>

A friend decided to remove the internal hard drive from an old Mac, put the drive into an external enclosure, and hook that up to his new Mac. But now the new Mac doesn’t recognize the drive and is asking him if he wants to reformat it. What’s the best and safest way for him to move that data over to his new Mac?

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With the idea of saving your relationship, let me start by saying that your friend’s idea wasn’t entirely boneheaded. There are indeed conditions under which you can jerk a hard drive out of an old Mac, shove it into an enclosure, and boot another Mac from it. Those conditions include having an operating system compatible with the new Mac and a drive formatted in a compatible way. In cases where the OS is quite old and the computer quite new, there can be problems as new Macs often demand an operating system no older than the one that shipped with them.</p><p class="jumpTag"><a href="/article/2838784/how-to-transfer-data-from-your-old-computer-to-a-new-yosemite-mac.html#jump">To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here[/url]</p></section></article>

Source: How to transfer data from your old computer to a new Yosemite Mac (http://www.macworld.com/article/2838784/how-to-transfer-data-from-your-old-computer-to-a-new-yosemite-mac.html#tk.rss_all)