Installing Snow Leopard from External Hard Drive

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Installing Snow Leopard from External Hard Drive

Hi everybody.

I'm trying to install Snow Leopard for my Macbook from 2006 through an external hard drive. I've partitioned a part of my external hard drive and used Disc Utility to essentially make an image of the installer onto my hard drive. However, I'm having trouble getting the Mac to "see" the image when I boot it and hold option.

My guess is that the problem lies with the fact that my external hard drive requires a password to access the drive files. There seems to be no way for me to remove the password. I'm using a 1 TB My Book Essential hard drive.

Any suggestions? Thank you.

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Aug 1, 2011 3:15 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 26, 2012 8:16 AM in response to PeterYHyun

Hello! I think you have to Restore your Hard Drive first, and make a GUID Partition with Disk Utility, if you don´t make that, your hard drive can be BOOTABLE! This can be the problem! 🙂

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Answer 2

Sep 29, 2012 11:37 AM in response to PeterYHyun

"How to install Snow Leopard from an External Hard Drive"

* Launch Disk Utility
* Select the External Firewire/USB device that you want to use as the boot drive for the upgrade
* Click “Partition” from the menu options
* Select 1 Partition, then click “Options” below the partition scheme
* Select the top option for “GUID Partition Table” – it MUST be GUID to be bootable!
* Click OK to create the GUID partition (this will reformat the drive, ie: all data is lost)
* Next, click the “Restore” tab within Disk Utility
* Select your newly made Snow Leopard 10.6 Install DVD image and restore this image to the GUID partition you just created OR…
* Alternatively, you can select the Snow Leopard Install DVD and restore directly from the DVD to the GUID partition
* After the restoration is complete, your GUID partition will now be bootable by Mac OS X!
* Reboot the Mac holding down the “Option” key to pull up the boot loader, select the Snow Leopard install drive you just created rather than your default Mac OS hard drive
* Install Snow Leopard as usual! User uploaded file

Hope this helps! 🙂

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