Booting internally from a harddrive that was used on a different Mac I just bought a new Mac Mini 2012 and have just replaced the drive in it with an SSD from my old MBP. Now the Mac Mini won't boot anymore, showing a stop sign when I try (after holding alt to begin with) from either the bootable main volume or recovery partition. I.e. it sees the drive, so I'm hoping it isn't a hardware problem. Isn't this supposed to work? I seem to recall having changed bootable drives between machines before and it being able to adapt to the new hardware, but maybe I'm confusing it with booting from an external drive. At any rate, the goal is to restore the exact system I had, but on this new machine. 

I have a CCC backup on my network of the drive in question. Do I need to first install OSX fresh, boot into the fresh install and then restore the old backup? Though I don't see how that's any different?
What operating system(s) are we talking about here?  If you installed say, a retail copy of Snow Leopard on one machine, then transferred the HD to another machine, that might work.

But if you installed your OS using the disks that came with the machine, those disks are specific to the machine itself: they're streamlined with various drivers and whatnot, is my understanding, and will not work in another machine.

I'd have to read up again in the CCC documentation but I believe there are also instances where files that are hard-coded with UUID's or MAC addresses or something that need to be properly re- created when moving a drive to another machine.