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10.7 on an external drive?

P

porcupine8

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 2, 2011
844
5
I have no real desire to upgrade to Lion because I don't want my OS X getting any more ios-ish. But I do want to use iBooks Author. I think from my googling that this would work, but I just want a sanity check:

I have an external drive connected that time machine backs up to. If I partition that drive, I should be able to install 10.7 on one partition and have it bootable and run iBooks Author there, while still using the other partition for backups, right? (The hard drive has tons of extra space, it's twice the size of my internal hard drive.)

How big would the Lion partition need to be? And is thre any Wine-like way to do this without having to reboot to get in and out of Lion?
 
Partron22

Partron22

macrumors 68030
Apr 13, 2011
2,655
808
Yes
Sure, it'll work. My System and Lib are about 20 gigs, another 12 for Apps gives 32 GB tot. A 60GB partition should do the trick. A hundred would give you some room to grow. Consider the size of your iTunes Library, and whether you'll want to move it before you partition.
 
Fishrrman

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
28,401
12,523
"I have an external drive connected that time machine backs up to. If I partition that drive, I should be able to install 10.7 on one partition and have it bootable and run iBooks Author there, while still using the other partition for backups, right?"

Yes, this will work. I do it with my own iMac.

I use a "bare hard drive" sitting in a USB/SATA docking station as my 10.7 "boot drive".

Lion will install to it, no problems.

Because it's USB, the initial bootup will be slower. But once up and running, it runs as fast (in my perception) as would an internal spinning hard drive.
 
J

JTravers

macrumors 6502a
Jun 28, 2010
733
228
I think what would work best is running Lion in a VM. That way you don't have to reboot the system in order to access iBooks Author.
 
I

iVoid

macrumors 65816
Jan 9, 2007
1,145
190
"while still using the other partition for backups, right?"

It will work, but having your boot volume and backup volume on the same physical drive can be dangerous.

If you have a hardware failure then you lose both your boot volume and your backup volume.

So generally you want your data/boot on one physical drive and the backup on another physical drive.
 
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