Can Aperture be migrated or reinstalled from iMac to MacBook Pro (which has no DVD drive)? Can Aperture be migrated or reinstalled a new MacBook Pro which has no DVD drive? Would target disk mode work to simply copy the file? I think Aperture usually runs an "installation" rather than just drag onto the Applications folder. But I can't remember since it has been years since I installed it on my iMac.
Two options:

Option 1) Share the DVD drive from your iMac to your MacBook Pro.

Go to the "Sharing" panel in System Preferences on your iMac.

You can then install the software over your LAN connection.

However, this doesn't always work, and it's very slow.

Option 2) Make an ISO of your installation CD/DVD.

This requires using the Terminal.app, but it's fairly painless.


Insert the disk in the iMac
Go to Terminal.app and type mount and press return, and you will see something like this:

/dev/disk1 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)   


except that you will also see a "/dev/disk" entry for your DVD drive. I'll use "/dev/disk2" as an example but yours will (probably) be different.

Then you want to enter this in Terminal:

/bin/dd if="/dev/disk2" of="$HOME/Desktop/Aperture.iso" bs=2048


once you press enter you will hear the DVD drive spin up, but Terminal won't say anything.

Note: if you get a message about the device being "busy" launch DiskUtility.app and "unmount" the DVD (but do NOT eject it).

Terminal will just work quietly for awhile and then after 10-20 minutes (or more or less, it depends) it will say something like "18397+0 records in" and "18397+0 records out" (note: I just made up '18397' as an example, the point is that the records "in" and "out" should be the same.)

This will leave you with a file called "Aperture.iso" on your Desktop.


Eject your Aperture DVD/CD now (if you used DiskUtility to unmount it, use DiskUtility to eject it now)
Once the DVD is ejected, double click on the Aperture.iso file, and it should "mount" just as if you had inserted the DVD again.


If it did not work, you probably had the /dev/disk wrong or there was an error reading the disk.

If it mounts as expected, simply copy the ISO file to your MacBook Pro and use it as the installer.

I have been doing this with all my DVD installers since I bought my MacBook Air a few years ago. It's a nice backup and installation from an ISO is a lot faster than from an actual DVD too.