Installing Leopard on external USB drive

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.
I would see if the external drive can first be partitioned and formatted in Leopard directly by running DU in the Leopard Utility folder, not from the DVD.
I would check for a firmware update for your drive box.

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I've read through the various posts on the subject and there doesn�t seem to be a definitive answer on this. I've got a Lacie USB2 DL DVD drive which I'm trying to use to install leopard on an earlier MacBook Pro (core duo 2.0ghz). I've tried the various suggestions (hold c on boot, hold option key on boot, set dvd as startup drive), and so far been unsuccessful. The drive is just not recognized.
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Message was edited by: cwebb

how do I load Leopard on the external drive
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Would it be best to do all the formatting and installation from my own MacBook Pro?
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Installing Leopard on external USB drive

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