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OK to Install Lion on external hard drive?

ohla313

ohla313

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 24, 2010
778
0
I have a brand new drive in an enclosure that I want to install Lion to. I made a boot disc and USB drive to do this. My plan is to install Lion onto the external drive while keeping my original hard drive in my MBP with SL.

My main question is: Would it be ok to install Lion to a USB external drive?

Later when Lion gets all compatibility issues settled, I plan to switch the drives. Would this be done with no complication?

Also should I install via USB or DVD?
 
Jerome Morrow

Jerome Morrow

macrumors 6502a
Jun 13, 2011
590
0
United Kingdom
To USB external drive is fine, but it will be slower (you already know that). There are quite few problems with firewire, so you should avoid that for now.
 
Madd the Sane

Madd the Sane

macrumors 6502a
Nov 8, 2010
534
73
Utah
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I had Snow Leopard booted off of an External HD until the HD died. It should be possible to do the same with Lion.
 
G

gentlefury

macrumors 68030
Jul 21, 2011
2,866
23
Los Angeles, CA
It can be done, but its really not recommended...it will be very slow and most likely very unstable. Best method would be eSata if you have a card for it. Thunderbolt could handle it too....but the only MBP with thunderbolt already has Lion on it.
 
iLog.Genius

iLog.Genius

macrumors 601
Feb 24, 2009
4,908
452
Toronto, Ontario
It can be done. I've been using Lion on an external HDD to play around with it. It is slower (depending on which application you're running or want to run) but it isn't terribly slow, in some won't even notice a big difference.
 
ohla313

ohla313

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 24, 2010
778
0
Well I have two hard drives so I rather keep them separate. I installed Lion on the new drive without a hitch. Waiting for spotlight to finish indexing. My install took 14gb of my drive when I checked it's info after I first logged in. Is this normal?
 
ohla313

ohla313

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 24, 2010
778
0
Because I eventually will use lion as my primary machine and don't want to clutter that drive.
 
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