Chosen Solution
I have a Macbook Pro early 2009 with replaceable battery. It has broken down. My solution was to buy a used Macbook Pro 2.53 Ghz, mid 2009. The hard drive from the broken down computer has Yosemite installed as the OS. The 2.53 Ghz machine has El Capitan installed as the OS. I want to preserve some software with features in iTunes that are no longer available. There are other configuration settings I want to preserve as well. I want to replace the hard drive in the 2.53Ghz machine with the hard drive from the broken down machine. Can I do this? I noticed from hard drive replacement for the 2.53 Ghz machine on iFixit that the hard drive is mounted in the same bracket as the optical drive. It is listed as dual hard drive. Thank you for time and attention; JK
You can surely set up a dual drive if that’s what you’re asking for, but you’ll have to remove your optical drive and buy an enclosure/adapter for that purpose to be able to run both hard disks at the same time. Consider the optical drive port is slower than the Sata port normally used for hard drives. If instead all you need is to transfer your drive from one Mac to another you’ll just have to loosen a couple of screws on each Mac to replace and swap drives. Yosemite can be updated to El Capitan any time you want without losing any files or settings. On the Apple store you should be presented with the possibility to download 10.11 at will.
I did it: I installed the hard drive with Yosemite in place of the hard drive with El Capitan. Everything appears to be working as expected. I now have the hard drive with El Capitan in the USB adapter case. So I don’t need to install a second drive. I have two other machines with High Sierra. I like to spread processing and storage load over different machines. Thank you all for responses JK
