Install Snow Leopard on an External Drive

Your steps seem pretty sound to me. My only piece of advice is this...

I've always felt more comfortable holding the Option key instead of the C key. This is because it brings you to a screen where you can decide which drive / disc to book to.

From there everything else seems good. Just start to the install DVD, make sure your external is formatted as Mac OS Extended Journaled (HSF+) and it should install fine.

Then you can reboot while holding Option and select your new drive.... and run all the updates you need.

Good luck!

 

iMac Running Lion

I am doing something similar.

iMac running Lion 10.7.4.

I have an external hard drive that i want to install Snow Leopard on so that i can choose to boot between that and my existing Lion desktop.

I have partitioned the hard drive and made sure that it was GUID and Journaled.

I am unable to install from my Snow Leopard disk.

Selecting the "Install" partition as "Destination"
Selecting "Mac OS X Install DVD.cdr" as "Source"
Clicking "Restore"

The utility wants to "Scan Disk Image" and i get a box that says "Unable to Scan: Resource Busy"

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

It sounds like you are in Disk Utility and are using the Restore tab to copy the 10.6 install DVD to your external drive.

This will not actually install 10.6 on the drive but simply copy the disc to it.

If you actually want to install it on the external drive and make it bootable, you will need to start to the install DVD.

Try this:

Restart your computer and hold down option
Select the Install DVD once it loads
There will be a menu that lets you select the destination you want to install (where you will install 10.6)
Select your external drive let it install there.

That should take care of your issue if I'm understanding your issue correctly.

Let me know how it goes!

 

iMac

Worked great! Thank you very much.