Installing Mac OS X Tiger on an external hard drive

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Level 1

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Installing Mac OS X Tiger on an external hard drive

I was wondering how to install Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on an external hard drive. I have a 40GB USB/Firewire LaCie Mobile Hard Drive.

I've tried using disk utility to convert it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but when I attempt install Mac OS Tiger from the system disc after restarting the computer, it shows the available disks that Tiger can be installed on and the ones it can't be installed on, and my external drive shows up as one that it can't be installed on for some reason.

I don't really want to clone my internal hard drive to the external one, but instead want to just be able to use my external hard drive as a mobile startup disk where I can work on files using other Mac computers when I'm away from home.

Any suggestions?

Apple Mac mini (late 2005) Mac OS X (10.4.7) PowerMac10,2: 1.5GHz, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, BT/AE...

Posted on Aug 12, 2006 9:26 PM

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Answer 1

John Child

Level 4

1,349 points

Aug 12, 2006 9:43 PM in response to Nick alias

Hi Nick,

Your Mini will only install to or boot from firewire external drives. Be sure you are using the firewire connection, not USB, to connect the drive when you try to install.

Good luck; let us know,

John

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Answer 2

Nick alias Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 12, 2006 9:53 PM in response to John Child

I have been using it as a Firewire drive.

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Answer 3

Aug 12, 2006 10:06 PM in response to Nick alias

Are you sure the drive is bootable? Not all FireWire drives are. Check with LaCie.

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Answer 4

Nick alias Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 12, 2006 10:27 PM in response to Malcolm Rayfield

In Disk Utility it shows that it is bootable.

"Bootable: Yes"

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Answer 5

Alexandre

Level 3

854 points

Aug 12, 2006 10:40 PM in response to Nick alias

Have you gone into "System Preferences" and changed the "start up disk"
to the firewire one?

One important thing though. Once you change that setting, should, for ANY reason, the external drive fail to start, you will not get the system running. In that case, I think, you'd need the CD?

Haven't tried this yet on mine, as the ports only ever seem to "open" AFTER the booting up. But Firewire should be ok.

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Answer 6

Nick alias Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 12, 2006 10:44 PM in response to Alexandre

I haven't been able to install Mac OS X Tiger on the drive in the first place, so I can't change the startup disk.

First I need to install Tiger on it.

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Answer 7

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Aug 13, 2006 7:13 AM in response to Nick alias

I've tried using disk utility to convert it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but when I attempt install Mac OS Tiger from the system disc after restarting the computer, it shows the available disks that Tiger can be installed on and the ones it can't be installed on, and my external drive shows up as one that it can't be installed on for some reason.

What did you do in DU? Erase? Partition? and what was it before? or just to enable journaling? What is on the LaCie now and does it have adequate space?

Do you have an upgrade Tiger disk?

And why not just clone the system using CCC and skipping /Users and other directories you want to skip?

One last thing: click on the volume and do a Get Info and make sure that Ignore Ownership is not selected.

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Answer 8

Nick alias Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 13, 2006 11:35 AM in response to Nick alias

I fixed the problem by erasing and re-formatting the entire external hard drive and then it worked.

At first, I had two partitions on it, Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which I set to take 12GB of space, and the other partition FAT 32, which took up 25GB of space. I think that I needed more than just 12GB of space available on the Mac partition to be able to install OS X Tiger, so I just started from scratch and erased, reformatted, and repartitioned the whole drive to only one partition of Mac OS Extended (journaled) and than was able to install Mac OS X Tiger on it.

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