Can i install SL on external usb drive & how to transfer over existing HDD

Hi
I have a MBP with around 200Gb used on a 500GB hdd ( installed after warantee ran out ). The MBP has been working fine for a year or so now but when i tried installing Snow Leopard i found the HDD was not setup as GUID which stopped the installation.
I thought i would install SL on an external USB drive which had been setup as GUID but after 4 attempts this failed as well for some unknown reason.
What i would like to know is,
1. if possible, how to transfer my data and settings etc to the external hdd from my current hdd inside the laptop.
2. How to set up boot camp ( i have a few ms programs that run erratically in mac fusion or parallels)
Can anyone help with this?
Thanks
Kev

Hi Harrison,
is this a firewire drive? Be aware that you cannot boot from a USB drive: Don't start up from an external USB device.
Also make sure your drive's firmware is up to date.

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ALSO: Am I correct in saying that if I replace my current hard drive with an SSD one?
If so: that *****
Thanks
Omar

OS X doesn't matter what disk you boot from, as long as it can be formatted properly in Disk Utility. You can boot from a USB stick drive if it's big enough.
Thunderbolt would be the fastest, the drive would be the limiting factor there. You can find Thunderbolt drives like these at stores like macsales.com. But USB 3 might also feel fast enough.
If you have boot systems installed on many drives connected to your Mac, the way you tell the Mac which one to use is to hold down the Option key at startup. This will present icons of all the connected drives you can boot from, then you just pick one and go.

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I have an iMac G5 isight that has unreliable internal hard drive connection. I've swapped out several hard drives that work fine in other computers, but there seems to be an issue with accessing it on this iMac.
So I would like to try and install OSx on an external usb drive. I have alreay found that I can boot from an external usb on this computer, the problem is it won't let me install OSx on to the usb drive when I boot from a disc.
The only other macs I have are Intel based which won't let me put a powerpc installation on to an external.
I'd rather not purchase a firewire external, and I'm not sure that I know of anyone with a working powerpc mac.
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Use a product such as Carbon Copy Cloner to clone an already existing PowerPC or Universal installation to an external partitioned using the APM table map. The OS used must be at least as new as the iMac and not newer than 10.5.8.
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Hi there,
I am trying to wipe a drive clean via an external USB drive box. Might somebody explain how I can do this? When I boot on the Leopard DVD I arrive at the drive choice screen and there is a big red "exclamation point" on the external USB drive mount icon. What can I do to get around this problem?
Cheers,
Noah

Noah Wallach wrote:
Hi there,
I am trying to wipe a drive clean via an external USB drive box. Might somebody explain how I can do this? When I boot on the Leopard DVD I arrive at the drive choice screen and there is a big red "exclamation point" on the external USB drive mount icon. What can I do to get around this problem?
Cheers,
Noah
Although you can boot some systems via USB, the drive must first and foremost be bootable. Not all external drives are bootable. The firmware must support booting. For example, my Maxtor 160 that I use for TM on my G5 states in the manual that it cannot boot.
You are having a somewhat different issue, in that you are not yet ready to boot, but the drive cannot be seen by DU.
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I have serveral external usb hd. I wanted to know if i attach one to my aging G4 1 ghz 512 mb mac.
Put in Leopard Install disc in my dvd drive, will Leopard install on the external and boot from it.
this way I could somehow dual booy 10.4 or 10.5... Is this even possible.
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I have external 80 GB USB 2.0 LaCie Hard Drive and want to install Tiger to it. But i have some problems...
I have bootable install DVD.
I'm inserting it, waiting, then choose language.
Then I'm starting Disc Utility, formatting whole drive to HFS+ filesystem, and then install Tiger to a new partition. All seems to be great, installation finishes, and says that i need to restart. Restaring... And my computer boots from DVD, not from HDD... Also, i looked in Startup Disc util, but thre is no my HDD, only boot DVD.
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disk2s10 - its my HFS+ partition in external drive.
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Without knowing how or what was on the USB drive (FAT32?) you might need to go into Disk Utility -> Partition -> Options and set the drive format to "GUID" from whatever it is now.
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I just brought a new iPod as my last one broke and I was wondering if there was a way to transfer my music currently stored on an external hard drive on to the iPod without having to have it using up disk space on my MacBook.
I was told in the Apple store by a sale guy that you can do this by creating a playlist in iTunes and dragging the music files in from the hard drive. He said it wouldn't be stored on the MacBook and the playlist could only be accessed (or music played on the macbook) when the hard drive was connected. But when we tried this it started transferring ALL of the music from the hard drive onto the main iTunes library and subsequently onto the disk space on the MacBook.
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kludge wrote:
R00KIE wrote:If using USB2 and a fast drive (ex. a hd in a box) then no speed issues, if running from a flash drive then booting is ok but when using if you need to write something to disk then the system will slowdown. Tried it myself.
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Welcome to Apple Discussions:
You probably do not have write access to the drive, if it came from a Mac with another account.
In a terminal run the command
ls -al /volumes
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drwxrwxrwx 1 nero nero 16384 Dec 18 13:02 TravelDrive
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Message was edited by: nerowolfe

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   Processor Name:        Intel Core i5
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   Number of Processors:           1
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   L3 Cache:        3 MB
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   Boot ROM Version:     MBP102.0106.B07
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   Serial Number (system):         C02L250VFFRP
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Hello Ian. I am currently using Lion installed on a WD My Passport 500Gig drive connected to my MBPro via USB, which is still running 10.6.8. Like you I am not prepared to lose all my currently functioning Mac, but also like to see how the new OS runs before making the total switch, maybe when it gets to 10.7.2
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Are these new external drives? How are the currently formatted? Have you tried doing this:
Drive Preparation
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Can i install SL on external usb drive & how to transfer over existing HDD

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