Imagine a situation where you got two Mac minis with almost similar configurations; however you need to transfer the wireless card from say Mac2 to Mac 1.
What will you do: simply swap the hard drives, move the wireless card manually or anything else?
There are many ways in which this can be accomplished. Moving the Airport is definitely easier than moving the hard drive; however even moving the hard drive is not that much more difficult, technically speaking. Nevertheless there are other more viable options, as you will find, than moving the hard drives or airport manually. Let’s have a look.
FireWire and an External Hard Drive
Using a FireWire can be the easiest and least cumbersome process of all.
• First plug it to the Mac 1 and clone its content on an external hard drive with tools such as Carbon Copy Cloner.
• Now confirm whether the external hard drive can boot Mac2 and contains all the data.
• Now connect both the Minis with the FireWire and boot Mac 1 while holding down key ‘T’. This boots Mac 1 in ‘FireWire Target Disc Mode’ for Mac 2.
• Doing this means that Mac 1 hard drive appears as an external hard drive for Mac 2.
• Now clone all the content from Mac 2 to Mac 1 hard drive. Now you will have Mac 2 data on both the computers.
• Shut down both Minis and attach the external hard drive, which has all the data of Mac 1, to Mac 2. Transfer all the data from the external drive to Mac 2.
Doing this you would exchange the data from Mac 1 hard drive to Mac 2 hard drive and be able to use the wireless card with the hard drive you wanted. In essence you swap the content without physically changing the hard drives
Now doesn’t this look a lot cleaner than unscrewing and screwing the hard drives back again?