Anyone have any ideas how I can do this? (Mac OS Dual Boot question)

[chrono1081]

Hi guys,

I was wondering if there is any way to dual boot Snow Leopard and Lion. The reason I ask is that I cant upgrade from Snow Leopard until I'm sure all of my software works on it, but I need Lion for the OpenGL 3.2 implementation. Dual booting seems like the logical solution since my production programs can stay in Snow Leopard while XCode stays in Lion.

To further complicate things the Lion drive would need to be on an external since all of the drives inside my computer are roughly 3/4 full and can't be moved as their contents are essential to my workflow.

So basically my question is is can I dual boot snow leopard and lion while having lion on an external drive?

EDIT: If anyone has a tutorial they know of it would be most helpful 🙂 For some reason I can't find anything online about it thats relevant to current OSs.

 

[andalusia]

Yes you can.

 

[Madd the Sane]

You can either install Lion on an external hard drive (USB or FireWire, doesn't matter) or resize your boot partition and make a new partition for Lion.

For the Mac, it has always been easier to boot off of multiple OSes.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Fortunately for you (and for me) this is VERY easy to do. Just install the OS as normal, choosing an external drive for the destination when prompted for which disk to install to. That's it!

The Mac I am typing this on has a triple-boot setup (3 partitions on the internal drive - Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion). Works great!

 

[chrono1081]

Fortunately for you (and for me) this is VERY easy to do. Just install the OS as normal, choosing an external drive for the destination when prompted for which disk to install to. That's it!

The Mac I am typing this on has a triple-boot setup (3 partitions on the internal drive - Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion). Works great!

Oh wow I thought it would be much more of a pain than that. Thanks so much everyone for the info! This will be nice so that I can test out Maya and a few other apps to make sure they fully work in Lion before I upgrade my main work machine.