A friend of mine has an iMac.  Long story short, it went pop and she’s now got a new one and the old HDD.

She wants to recover her data from the old drive (yes yes backups, I’ve given her that lecture).  Am I right in thinking it’s the same as in the PC world, get a USB caddy and whack the drive in, job jobbed, or is it Not That Simple?

Thanks in advance, card’s behind the bar etc.

yep – if it’s the old HDD, you can just put it in a caddy, plug it in and hold down the option key during boot and it will give you the option of booting from the old drive.

As Batfink says. I’ve done it on one iMac, was planning on doing on the last one, but I managed to nurse it along to mange a Time Machine backup. Restored from Time Machine in the end.

Its the one thing Mac makes relatively easy, migrating from one machine to another.

Or get caddy. Start new iMac. It’ll give you the option to migrate data/apps from an old one. Select the disk in the caddy when you get the option. Job’s jobbed.

Or if you’ve set up already, start “Migration Assistant” on the new mac and it’ll pull everything in from the old HDD.

 it will give you the option of booting from the old drive.

She doesn’t want to do that, she just wants her “work and photos”.

Or if you’ve set up already, start “Migration Assistant” on the new mac and it’ll pull everything in from the old HDD.

Boom.  Marvellous, thank you.

“it will give you the option of booting from the old drive”

“>She doesn’t want to do that, she just wants her “work and photos”

So when it boots up just re-save the “work and photos” somewhere else…. dropbox, usb stick whatever, then restart the machine (on the new internal) and import the recovered stuff from where you’ve just saved it.