Installing Mac OS X Leopard on an external drive

[brian_delizza]

I have had leopard for about a year and have been waiting for that "special reason" to install it. Well I decided that Pro Tools 8 is a good reason. I have a huge fear of losing data, and although my stuff is backed up, I'd rather not deal with it. That being said, I chose to start fresh and install leopard to an external drive.

I'd like to think that running an OS off of an external drive is a good idea, but something tells me its not (considering that my audio drive, this drive, and my interface are all FW400.)

So here is my plan:

1. Install Leopard (did that)
2. Make a clone of my Tiger boot drive (now internal) to an external drive
3. Wipe the internal drive and install Tiger on that volume
4. Transfer all vital info from boot drive to new leopard drive.

I know that I could have skipped step 1 but I am impatient and I want to start messing with PT 8 for now. I still am waiting for another hard drive to be shipped to me so I have a couple of days of running it off of the external.

I guess my questions are: Is there a big problem with running the OS off of an external drive? Am I going about this the best way? Any suggestions/feedback?

Thanks guys (and gals).

Brian

[Phelan Kane]

I know you have to format the external drive with GUID enabled (an option via disk utility) to make it bootable.

I have an external Lacie as an emergency Tiger boot drive but I have never run major apps from it.

I'd make sure you don't over load your FW bus. May be someone on here has more experience?

[brian_delizza]

Originally Posted by Phelan Kane

I'd make sure you don't over load your FW bus. May be someone on here has more experience?

That was my concern. So far it works, but all I have done is run installers and surf gearslutz while I wait for PT 8 to download. Even being on the FW port it seems to be running much faster than Tiger was for me. That probably has to do with all the crap I had installed though. In about 20 minutes this PT8 installer should be done and I'm gonna load some intense sessions to see how it holds up.

[brian_delizza]

Well it looks like I won't be making the switch quite yet. The bulk of the plug-ins that I use (Waves Platinum, Komplete, Camel, etc) are not yet compatible with PT 8. PT 8 is fun though, the new VI's are pretty cool.

[The MPCist]

If you've got a MacPro computer, you can just thow in a new HD into one of the HD bays, install a clean OSX/PT8 and play around with it/experiment... And if things go bad or problematic, you can always startup on the old Tiger HD.....

I'm doing this at this very moment and taking advantage of the holidays to bring my working computer up to speed with the latest versions of OS, PT8, Logic Pro8, VI's, plugins,etc. I'm still keeping the Tiger HD to finish up any work that is still in progress and also just in case the new system is unstable....

[brian_delizza]

I'm on a PPC G5, which holds two internals (both full, one bootable.) I am going to pull out the one that is not holding the OS and throw it in an external enclosure. Then I'll just pop in an internal and be able to boot off of both like you said. I am really mad about not being able to use those plug-ins though. Its killing me...