10.6: Create a bootable 10.6 partition on an APM drive

Nov 05, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: poenn

Snow Leopard only hintAs someone responsible for supporting Macs, I carry around an external drive (LaCie Rugged with USB2, FW400, and FW800 connectors) that holds all my tools, as well as different versions of OS X, reaching from 10.3 (PowerPC) to 10.5. Recently, I had the time to finally add a 10.6 partition to the drive, and noticed that Snow Leopard won't install on a non-GUID drive -- the Installer simply won't let you continue.

I can't afford to loose the ability to boot PowerPC systems like 10.3 or 10.4 or even the universal 10.5, so repartitioning as GUID was not an option here. Knowing that Intel versions of OS X will boot just fine (though officially unsupported) on APM-formatted drives, I solved this in a somewhat inelegant but effective way: I installed 10.6 on another drive with the GUID partition scheme, and simply cloned it back to an empty partition on my APM drive.

So for now, at least, I can still use one drive to boot all these systems: 10.3 PowerPC, 10.4 PowerPC, 10.4 Intel, 10.5 (Universal), 10.6 (Intel only, of course). Note that this might change in the future (10.7?), but for now, it works fine.

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