Installing OS X on an external HDD
If I install 10.6 onto an external HDD, using the retail DVD, will I be able to use that install to boot different type of Mac (e.g. MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Pro etc.)?
Or will the drive only be able to boot the system that I used during the original installation?
Or will the drive only be able to boot the system that I used during the original installation?
Comments
1) If the computer does not support that OS (eg: a PPC machine and Snow Leopard) then doing this will not change that.
2) If the computer is newer than the point-release you are using (eg: you are using 10.6.0 and trying to boot the i7 iMacs) then this will not work. New computers have new hardware that older OSs were not built for.
3) There are a few oddities like the LocalKDC where having multiple copies of it are not always a good idea. This probably won't get in your way, but every once in a while it crops up on the sysadmin or imaging lists.
This is a pretty normal thing for sysadmins to carry around. Apple has been very trusting in their licensing enforcement methods, so things like this can work. On Windows this is much more complicated.
A few months ago I think I saw an excellent concise tutorial on how to create a bootable USB stick. Can't find it now. Does anyone know where it is?
Assuming that your USB thumb drive is bootable (some USB devices are not), and your computer supports booting from USB (all intels do), then the minimum directions are to just partition it and then install from DVD.
If I was doing it then I would use System Image Utility (part of the MacOS X Server Admin Tools, a free download from Apple) to make a NetBoot image from a partition that I have setup the way I want. You then have to add the bootloader back in, and then put that image down on the computer. The nice thing about a NetBoot image for this purpose is that it does not try and put /tmp or other things on the boot drive, since it assumes it is read-only.