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Running El Capitan on an external drive?

Is is possible to install and run El Capitan on an external drive, while running and keeping my old Snow Leopard 10.6.8, and still run Snow Leopard on my 7 year old MacBook Pro, or doesn't it work like that and both have to have same OS running? I just want to keep the existing OS on the laptop that I know and use, where so much isn't compatible with later OS, but want to check it out anyway, hence can it be done and can I use El Capitan alongside it on the external? Thanks for any help

MacBook Pro

Posted on Mar 3, 2018 7:25 AM

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Limnos

Level 10

411,253 points

Posted on Mar 3, 2018 9:15 AM

You can but you won't want to do it long-term. Unless you can run it over Firewire (I'm not sure if your computer has that, but maybe) it will be slow over USB2. I run Mavericks on an external drive over USB2 (have to on my computer) and it takes 3-4 minutes to boot.

Be careful which files you open when running ElCapitan. For example, if you're running an older iTunes version and you open you library with a newer version on El Capitan it will irreversibly update your library file so it can no longer be opened with the older version.

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Running El Capitan on an external drive?

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