[underwhelmed]

I was making a fresh install to an external hard drive attached to USB to try in my G4 Power Mac Cube(The DVD drive eats discs) I was using the Mini Boot123 disc and my Leopard DVD. I had disabled the SSD in the Bios, and when I got to the screen in the installer to choose the drive to install to, there was the external drive as well as my mini 9 ssd.

Luckily, I am already running 10.5.7 so it had a yellow triangle on the drive icon and said it couldn't be installed there because it was a newer version, but I could have wiped out my install in Disk Utilities if I had clicked the wrong drive. Not likely, but possible.

Anyway, the bios settings seem to take a back seat to the OS settings, and hadn't seen this posted before, so I figured I should report it. Might help someone else

[jim5055]

Originally Posted by underwhelmed

I was making a fresh install to an external hard drive attached to USB to try in my G4 Power Mac Cube(The DVD drive eats discs) I was using the Mini Boot123 disc and my Leopard DVD. I had disabled the SSD in the Bios, and when I got to the screen in the installer to choose the drive to install to, there was the external drive as well as my mini 9 ssd.

Luckily, I am already running 10.5.7 so it had a yellow triangle on the drive icon and said it couldn't be installed there because it was a newer version, but I could have wiped out my install in Disk Utilities if I had clicked the wrong drive. Not likely, but possible.

Anyway, the bios settings seem to take a back seat to the OS settings, and hadn't seen this posted before, so I figured I should report it. Might help someone else

Yup seen the same thing, not on a dell mini but on my dell SC440 server now running 10.5.4. I can disable drives in bios and this effectively sets the boot drive - the enabled drive is now the boot drive - but once OS X is running all drives installed can be seen. As one such drive is my safety drive (duplicate OS X copy) I power it down to avoid such near misses.

[underwhelmed]

I was going to remove the SSD, but assumed disabling it in BIOS would keep it from being seen or accessed by the installer.

Oh well, lesson learned. No harm, no foul.

Just thought it might help someone else to post the information.