External & Multiple Version Booting

D

dsatterfield

Registered
Hi Everyone:

I support Macs at work and I need to be able to install OSX on an external drive and then move the external drive from System A to System B and have it see it so I can boot from it in order for us to be able to salvage data, preferences, shove out new images, etc.

Would this solution work? Would the systems get confused about doing this the single partition or would I have to have plan a partition for each system times the number of versions? If OS9 is installed and you unplug the external drive would it boot to OS9 automatically? Would you have any issues with starting up and running it?

If You put a couple of versions or OSX on your system. does it has created problems and would there be problems when choosing which you want to boot from?

thanks
David
 
At startup you can always select which system you want to start up from, whether it is on the HD, on a FireWire disk or a CD.
In the SystemPrefs you can set the startup disk, which will not be affected by booting from an external disk.
Multiple systems is not a problem, many people have used dual boot systems with OS 9 and OS X: I have done so without any problems at all.
However, different bootable systems have to be on different partitions.
When there seems to be no bootable volume or it is set wrong, a mac will always search for a bootable volume and try to boot from it.

So, in short, I think it should work. ;)
 
Different bootable systems need only be on separate partitions if they are unaware of each other, like an OS X installation and a Linux installation, or two OS X installations. OS 9 and OS X CAN reside on the same partition without any problems, and you can boot back and forth between them until your heart's content. That's the way Apple designed OS 9 and OS X and one of the reasons your Applications folder was renamed to "Applications (OS 9)" when you upgradede from OS 8 to OS 9. If you want two different OS X installations, then yes, you need two different partitions.

If you would like more than one OS X installation, yes, you would need more than one partition -- to be specific, at least one partition per installation of OS X. However, more than one installation of OS X on any one machine has been known to cause small problems, mainly because one installation of OS X starts looking on the other installation for programs and what-not sometimes.

People have experienced this with installs of OS X 10.2 and OS X 10.3 beta on different partitions -- for some reason, the 10.3 install starts trying to launch programs from the 10.2 partition. Simple way around this: unmount the partition that isn't the booted partition and everything should be fine.

Having OS X installed on an external drive and taking it from machine to machine and booting from it would work perfectly as far as I can see.
 
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