Are installs specific to machines?

[sammy.d]

Hi all,
I have an external hard drive, which I am wanting to partition and make bootable. This is partly for an emergency/troubleshooting scenario and partly just for the sake of doing it and learning. I have three partitions, one for time machine backups, one for a very basic snow leopard os and one for the mac os install disk (snow leopard also). Everything is going fine, installed fine, bootable etc, but I have just had a brainwave... I recall that the mac os install disk that came with my macbook (and is what I used for the image on the external drive and installing the os on the other partition) are made specifically for my model of macbook.

1- Does this mean that the partitions on the external drive of the install disk and/or snow leopard os will not work on another model mac than mine?
2- If they won't work, will they not mount at all, or will they just not be bootable?
3- Will any problems be fixed if I buy the retail snow leopard install dvd?
4- What is the difference in the installation of the install disc that came with my macbook and the retail install disc?

Cheers.

 

[AlanShutko]

Mostly an install is not specific to type of machine. Since new machines often have new hardware which need new drivers, they may not boot with older OS disks. However, newer OS disks, even if they come with a newer machine, should boot older machines.

If you install OS X on an external drive, and update it to the current version with software update, that drive should boot on any machine that is out.

 

[sammy.d]

i have screwed up... I think. The system requirements for the install said a drive with a minimum of 5 GB was required for the install so I made my partition on the external drive with the os 10 GB. However, the install has taken up 9 GB (didn't install developer tools or anything, deselected languages and printer drivers during installation). Now when I go to software update to update to 10.6.8 (which I really think is necessary) I get a message saying not enough disk space (i need about another 7 GB, even though the update is about 1 GB). When I boot using my internal drive and go into disk utility, I can't resize the partitions, they seem to be locked in their sizes (I thought I could somehow).

Could someone please tell me how to:
resize my partitions on the external drive
and/or
download the update file to my internal drive and run that for the os on the external drive so that I can get away with not having enough free disk space on the external one?

Cheers.