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With some of the recent progress on upgrading to SL 10.6.2, I'm wondering if anyone here has thought about (or done) the upgrade to an external USB drive?

I know that my 10.5.8 system works pretty well, with one small issue with sleep. I found that wake from sleep appears to work fine when I boot and only use the built-in screen. However, when I connect an external monitor, if I put my Mini 9 to sleep, it has trouble waking up properly. Other than that, everything else works.

I'm thinking that I can leave the 10.5.8 system on the 16G SSD card, but install a clean 10.6 and then upgrade to 10.6.2 on an external USB drive. When I'm portable, I work in Leopard, and when plugged in at my desk, I can reboot on the external drive into SL.

I've also wondered about building SL on the SDHC card, as I thought I heard of someone doing that. I also thought that you can't boot off the SDHC card, so I'd appreciate any clarification on that.

Anyone try dual booting different OSX versions on separate drives?

[charley]

I ran 10.5.8 on my SSD and 10.6.2 on a 500GB USB drive for some time before switching to 10.6.2 on my SSD.
The Mini9 can't boot from the SDHC as there are no drivers at boot time they are loaded with the operating system.

[reststop]

Originally Posted by charley

I ran 10.5.8 on my SSD and 10.6.2 on a 500GB USB drive for some time before switching to 10.6.2 on my SSD.
The Mini9 can't boot from the SDHC as there are no drivers at boot time they are loaded with the operating system.

Great! It looks like a project for this coming weekend, I need to find a usable USB drive, or break down and buy another one. (Recently bought a 1 TB drive, so I could backup some of my smaller drives). Looks like I have a 200G, 260G and a 160G drive on the shelf. (Most of my external drives are FireWire. Just checked and they all seem to have a USB connector, so it looks like I'm good to go).

One question, Charley, were you able to boot directly from the 10.6.x CD, or did you have to build a copy of the install CD on a USB drive and add NBI to boot? I have the SL CD image for 10.6.0 and the incremental upgrade images on a USB drive already, but have hesitated to do the install on another drive until now.

Thanks!

After checking out the NetbookInstaller 1 guide by MechDrew (found at http://osx.mechdrew.com/guides/nbi1.shtml), I may not wait until the weekend. Since I already copied the SL image to a USB drive, and NBI 3 final has been released, I may just go ahead and start the install tonight. All I need to do is hook up a new USB drive, since I am not overwriting my SSD just yet. At some point I may re-do all this and set up a dual/triple boot into Windows or Ubuntu, but for now, I'd be content to be able to swap between Leopard for iPhone work and SL for iPad preliminary testing (Not supposed to use the beta version of the new SDK for release code according to the SDK docs ;-)

I will report back here on my success.
-RS

[charley]

I installed 10.6.0 on the USB drive using a copy of SL DVD on USB stick and NBM/NBI. I chose an option to copy my 10.5.8 stuff from the SSD to the USB drive during the install. Then upgraded to 10.6.2. My USB drive was a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent GO.

[reststop]

Thanks Again Charley!

It appears that both my Apple Development copy of SL, and the Retail image I was expecting to use are giving me problems. I do not seem to be able to boot from the USB drive.

I get a kernel panic, with error code 2, apparently the same error with either image, whenever I try to boot. The only other time I've seen this type of panic, where I get the tinted screen with the message saying I have to hold down the power button and reboot my computer, is when my memory is bad. Pretty frustrated. I've also tried using the retail image as an external drive and manually try the install without booting to the SL image. It seems to abort without finishing the install. I've wasted 2 days with no real results.

I may go and purchase another retail SL DVD just to make sure my copy didn't get corrupted before I try it again after tonight. Maybe search online for confirmation of the checksum I get for the image to see if I can track it down that way.

Thanks. I will report back once I have some good news. Anyone who had problems with a kernel panic, feel free to tell me how you got around it.

-RS