Today my ancient but still fully functioning MacBook Pro decided to expand its girth like a Ram fed on turnips or me fed on Jerusalem Artichokes and pop it’s clogs. The first thing I noticed was that when I closed the lid it stuck up one side, then the track pad bulged out from the chassis and no longer clicked. I decided to take out the screws on the bottom panel suspecting a swelling battery but some of those were so tight like the belt of a fat man they would not budge. Once I did get the base off it was clear the thing was set to blow… I’ve removed the SSD and RAM and sadly it’s off to Apple tomorrow to get them to take it off my hands. I just hope it doesn’t burst into flames overnight, it was fully charged. Bought in 2011 it’s had RAM upgrades and an SSD and until now was the best built and most reliable Mac I’ve had. Don’t want to have to fork out for a new on though, not at the moment. ![[FatMac.JPG]] *See that belly bloat* #### Bringing it back to life Having extracted the SanDisk SSD (see above) I glibly thought I wonder if I can directly boot off this into the old iMac which had been converted to Linux? I found a USB drive caddy, had to remove some packing screws and a stuck on base to the SSD before it would fit into the caddy. Then is was just a matter of unplugging the current Linux boot external SSD and plugging in the caddy, booting with the ==Option== key held down until it found a drive and the machine just booted into the MacOS High Sierra out of the MacBook Pro. I know this should just happen and I shouldn’t be surprised but I was and I always am. Especially as this iMac 27” [[27” iMac 2015]] was highly recalcitrant over booting any form of MacOS after it’s internal HD failed, thus the AfterStep Linux and it’s inability to write to any external USB drive, but that’s a feature not a bug, allegedly. It is odd when transferring one drive onto another piece of hardware, most things just work but some of the settings just get totally mixed up. For example iCloud insists in re-signing in and then sucks down yet another version of its `Documents` on iCloud which it already has. MS Excel refused to let me sign in, the one thing I really needed to use this for. the UK VAT tax plug-in then insisted I re-registered with the Government Gateway the credentials to which I’d lost and a few other things performed oddly, I can only assume because it’s grafted onto new hardware. Foolishly, I’m now upgrading High Sierra —> Catalina the last MacOS to run smoothly on the iMac 27”. Will see how that goes when eventually it completes but taking a *very* long time… ##### Completely knackered. I knew trying to be *smart* would end badly. know when you have done enough and leave well alone. I had a fully functioning system. Not only was the disk from the bloated MBP working in an iMac which hadn’t been able to run MacOS for months and in all its glory. The simple action of trying to update to Catalina to get a bit more compatibility has undone all my work. It now just goes into an install loop, crashing with the familiar internal disk ‘tick’ just before completion. It’s not like the internal disk is even being used any more and it did work this morning. Aggggh! Hair tearing out moment if I still had some! I’ve got to admit I’m running out of working Mac’s. There is only the MacMini used for photo and video editing left and I really didn’t want to *pollute* that with office nonsense. I’ve sweated the assets until they broke which I suppose is the way it should be they are only tools after all and I’m possibly the biggest tool of the lot for making that mistake to upgrade today. Having hooked the SSD up to the MacMini and in spite of it being stuck in the middle of an upgrade of OS and going nowhere on the iMac it mounted fine on the MM, all the files were still there and I was able to run a copy of Excel off the external drive, with my account still logged in and without having to install on the local machine which I suppose is a win, win and I will stop tinkering-till-it-break’s.