Can I install Snow Leopard with an external disk drive?

I have been trying to update my software to Snow Leopard but I am using an external disk drive and when I try to install the software I get the message "The application 'Install Mac OS X' cannot be used from this volume". Is there any way to fix this problem?

Are you booting your computer from an external drive? If so please say why? How are you trying to upgrade to Snow Leopard? Do you have the 10.6.3 retail Snow Leopard DVD? On what drive are you trying to install Snow Leopard? Are you doing this?
1. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
2. Install Snow Leopard
If the drive is OK then quit DU and return to the installer. Proceed with installing OS X. Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files. After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system.
Download and install Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1. Then use Software Update to download and install any other needed updates for Snow Leopard.

Similar Messages

Can I install snow leopard on an external hard drive so I can run quicken 2006, and put snow leopard on my imac harddrive

Can I install snow leopard on an external hard drive in order to run my quicken 2006, and install lion on the hard drive of my imac?

You don't need to erase the drive and repartition from scratch. You may be able to add a second partition on the fly. The caveat here is that once you do that you cannot create a Windows partition using Boot Camp. Of course if you have no plans for Boot Camp then it isn't relevant.
To create a second partition on your existing startup volume:
To resize the drive do the following:
1. Open Disk Utility and select the drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list.
2. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.
3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed. (Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)
4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.
You should now have a new volume on the drive.
It would be wise to have a backup of your current system as resizing is not necessarily free of risk for data loss. Your drive must have sufficient contiguous free space for this process to work.
Now, you cannot add a new partition that exceeds the amount of contiguous free space at the end of the drive. Disk Utility will fail to add the partition if it cannot find sufficient contiguous free space. If that's the case then you will need to follow your state outline - backup, boot from clone, erase internal, repartition internal, restore backup to one of the partitions (or both in your case.)

I had Leopard on may Mac. I upgraded to Mountain Lion using Snow Leopard. I can't use my video with Mountain Lion. Can I load Snow Leopard on an external hard drive so I can use it with my camera?

I had Leopard on may Mac. I upgraded to Mountain Lion using Snow Leopard. I can't use my video with Mountain Lion. Can I load Snow Leopard on an external hard drive so I can use it with my camera?

First, you cannot do this if you have a Boot Camp partition.
Second: Create a new partition.
1. Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
After the main menu appears select Disk Utility and click on the Continue button. Select the hard drive's main entry then click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
2. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.
3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed. (Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)
4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.
You should now have a new volume on the drive.
It would be wise to have a backup of your current system as resizing is not necessarily free of risk for data loss. Your drive must have sufficient contiguous free space for this process to work.
Third: Install Snow Leopard.
Boot from your Snow Leopard DVD. Follow instructions for installation being sure that before you actually install Snow Leopard you have selected the new partition as your target destination.
Booting From An OS X Installer Disc
1. Insert OS X Installer Disc into the optical drive.
2. Restart the computer.
3. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the "C" key.
4. Release the key when the spinning gear below the dark gray Apple logo
appears.
5. Wait for installer to finish loading.

I have a 2007 Macbook Pro that is running 10.7.5 and I am trying to use a 10.6.3 DVD to install Snow Leopard to an external hard drive.

I have a 2007 Macbook Pro that is running 10.7.5 and I am trying to use a 10.6.3 DVD to install Snow Leopard to an external hard drive. I've followed every possible instruction on every which website. The problem is when I boot to Install disc, I am unable to choose which hard drive I'd like to install the OS on. It says that it is unable to Install and automatically takes me to Restore and suggests that I restore to Time Machine backups. Any and all help is appreciated.

lovinlife5959,
have you tried booting from the grey Mac OS X Install DVD that originally came in the box with your MacBook Pro? See if you can install its version of Mac OS X (either 10.4.9, 10.4.10, or 10.5.0, depending upon when it shipped from the factory) onto your external hard drive. If that works, boot from your external hard drive, run Software Update on it, and then try updating your external drive to 10.6.3 via the white Snow Leopard DVD.

HT3777 I have a Window 7 HP laptop. I want to install Snow Leopard on an external hard drive as the memory space on my laptop is very less. I have the original snow leopard disc and I think it's a retail version . Please guide me through the installation.

I have a Window 7 HP laptop. I want to install Snow Leopard on an external hard drive as the memory space on my laptop is very less. I have the original snow leopard disc and I think it's a retail version . Please guide me through the installation in details. Can you also please let me know about this boot camp.

You cannot. From a legal standpoint, the license agreement for OS X mandates that you run OS X only on Apple hardware. HP is not (yet) owned by Apple.
From a technical standpoint, your HP laptop doesn't use EFI, but rather an early predecessor called a BIOS. Apple is the only vendor of consumer computer hardware that uses EFI; other vendors reserve EFI for use in servers.
Secondly, Apple's operating systems support a rather limited number of configurations of video hardware and mainboard chipsets directly since they need only support those systems that they manufacture. You cannot use Windows software or drivers on OS X, so prior to installation, you would need to write your own hardware drivers for your laptop, create an OS X drive image on a Mac, and then modify that image with your drivers before putting it in the HP.
It will be simpler (and legal), to simply purchase a used Mac. Apple's online store has refurbished MacBook Airs starting at $850 and Mac Minis for $700. If you go to e-bay or craigslist, you'll find used Macs for considerably less.

I can't install Snow leopard on my hard disk which has 10.4.11 on and lots of space.

I can't install Snow leopard on my hard disk which has 10.4.11 on it and lots of space, I run the snow Leopard install disk and it says it cant be installed on my hard disk, which has 160 GB of space.

Which iMac? If it's a G5, the highest OS you can run is Leopard. Are you using the full retail copy of Snow, or a grey, machine specific disc from another computer? If it's the latter, that's the reason.
Message was edited by: WZZZ

Can I install snow leopard, using my original disk that came with the computer, on my mac that has mavericks as its OS?

I recently had a new hard drive installed in my macbook pro (2009 model). Previously I was running snow leopard and refused to upgrade as I knew it would cause my pro tools to become incompatible, however when I received my knew, hard drive due to my old one becoming corrupt, the apple techs had installed lion as the OS, I updated to mavericks on the off chance the incompatibility was just with Lion. However I my Snow leopard disk is also incompatible with the new OS, I would like to know if there is any way to install snow leopard onto my mac while it is using mavericks?

Restart the computer with the disk in the drive and the C key held down and install Snow Leopard onto a blank partition or drive. If needed, use the Disk Utility to repartition or erase the internal one.
(109275)

Can i install snow leopard with a flash drive?

i purchased the snow leopard family pack to upgrade 3 computers. I have installed it on one macbook pro, and finally got it to go on a mac mini. i am having an issue with my macbook pro, as it wont read the disc. Can i use a flash drive to install it? and how big should it be?

It's probably easier to install it more directly; to use a (working) DVD drive, rather than building yourself a USB keydisk. Get yourself an appropriate cable (probably FireWire) and Google or Bing search around for details of installing using what is known as Target Disk Mode, or alternatively scounge up an external USB DVD drive and use that directly on the OS X box with the failed DVD drive.

How Can I Install Snow Leopard with Only 4GB HD?

My MacBook needs an upgrade so that I can install the new Adobe Creative Suites, which require Snow Leopard 10.63 or higher. The problem is that the machine only has a 4GB HD and Snow Leopard requires at least 5GB free space to install. Is there anything that I can I do?

Additionally, you should maintain an absolute minimum of 10 - 15 GB of empty hard drive space at all times for the OS to function properly. In this case, that appears to translate to you having to delete or move (to an external drive) about 20 GB of files. You can move your iPhoto and iMovie libraries to an external drive permanently which would most likely create enough space.
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2302
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506

Snow Leopard on an external hard drive; sign-in issues, Snow Leopard on an external hard drive; sign-in issues

I have an older (circa 2006) MacBook running Tiger. I've been able to install Snow Leopard on an external hard drive and when I restart, it seems to boot from the external drive. However, it asks for a user name and password and the combination I use in Tiger doesn't work. I don't get an option for an admin user/password.
Any suggestions?

If you did a fresh installation from the original installer disk, then unless you used Migration Utility as part of the installation then you would have been stepped through the process to set up a user acount. Without that there would be no account to log into. So either you don't remember, you didn't install on an empty drive, or you used Migration Utility.
In any case, boot from the original installer, select the external drive, and under the Utilities menu choose Password Reset.
Regards.

Can't Install Snow Leopard on external drive

Hey Mac Addicts,
I'm trying to install Snow Leopard on an external drive (Lacie Triple Rugged, FW800 USB3.0) but keep on getting "Installation failed, can't copy the support files.
My drive is partioned in to 5x100GB partitions, GUID partition scheme. I boot from my installation disk, choose my partition and hit install. The DVD spins and spins and eventually give me a failure. I've tried not installing the custom options (Quicktime 7, Rosetta and have even unchecked X11) but still get the same.
The MacBook Pro I'm trying this from is running 10.6.8 and previous successful attempts at doing this were from 10.6.4, I'm thinking this is the issue, but would rather not have to clean install my machine and try again.
If anybody has any idea's that'll be marvellous, as I am a little confused and lost, especially as I've done this before.
All the best and thanks in advance.
BigMik

Two things,
1: Use FIrewire
2: Use Disk Utility to first Erase with Security Option Zero All Data, the entire drive, then setup the partitions
3: If it doesn't work, then increase the size of the 10.6 parittion or reducing the partitions until it works.
4: Also do all this from the Disk Utility on the internal drive, then try again from the 10.6 install disk. Apple might have pulled something.
Also you can clone your present OS X 10.6 partition using the donationware Carbon Copy Cloner, however the external partition needs to be large enough for all the contents (recommended)
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201

I can't install Snow Leopard on a brand new hard drive with a brand new optical drive.

I need help please. I have a 2009 MacBook Pro. The hard drive crashed a while back so I bought a new one. The original Snow Leopard disc that came with it was scratched so I bought a new one of it as well. After trying/failing to install Snow Leopard on the new hard drive about a dozen times I bought a new optical drive as well. I installed the new optical drive today, tried to install Snow Leopard again and STILL got the same installation error messages. Any help that anyone might be able to provide would be greatly appreciated.
Last error message:
Install failed: The Installer could not copy the necessary support files.

Did you partition and format the new drive first?
Drive Partition and Format
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
7. Upon completion quit Disk Utility and return to the installer. Complete the Snow Leopard installation.

When i try to install snow leopard with install disk, it has me restart the computer instead of installing. can anyone help me figure out how to get the disk to actually install?

when i try to install snow leopard with install disk, it has me restart the computer instead of installing. can anyone help me figure out how to get the disk to actually install?

Ok, it's just a glitch that it's not auto-rebooting from the disk.
Please backup your personal files off the machine to a regualr external drive and disconnect all drives before doing anything
Take the 10.6 disk out and clean and polish the bottom with a very soft clean cloth and a tiny bit of rubbing alcohol to cut the oils.
Stick the disk in and reboot holding c key down, this will make it boot from the disk and you can install Snow Leopard that way.

How can i install snow leopard on my mac G5 using a command line and booting from an external usb rom, since my disk i have is not a bootable media

How can i install snow leopard on my mac G5 using a command line and booting from an external usb rom, since my disk i have is not a bootable media

Hi.
You simply can't. Snow Leopard is compiled in Intel binary only.
Good Luck.

I have a new time capsule, want to use it in conjunction with iMac G5 and MacBook; laptop runs Snow Leopard but G5 can't install Snow Leopard, is stuck at OS 10.4.11. Am I doomed? Can anyone advise me? Thanks..

I have a new Time Capsule, want to use it in conjunction with an iMac G5 and a MacBook. MacBook runs Snow Leopard, but G5 (lacking Intel processor) can't install Snow Leopard, is stuck at OS 10.4.11. Am I doomed? Will appreciate any advice. Thanks.

you should still be able to get a copy of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), which should run on your G5.

Can I install Snow Leopard with an external disk drive?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for