Mac Tech Drive Setup

First of all you don't need recovery partitions. For 10.4 - 10.6 you only need bootable partitions with the contents of the install DVDs on them. For 10.7 - 10.10, you can make a bootable install partition by downloading "Install OSX 10.whatever.app" from the app store and following instructions for that particular version of OSX. You will need about 5GB of space for each of the newer versions of OSX so you could easily fit all of this on a 64 GB usb stick with 7 bootable OSX partitions of 6 about 6 GB each. Of course if you walk up to an old PPC based Mac you aren't going to have success booting from a USB stick but this stick should be useful on any Intel Mac that is capable of running the version of OSX you are attempting to install.

There are limitations to this approach. For instance, I expect the DVD installers for 10.4 and 10.5 to "just work" on hardware old enough to run those versions, but the "upgrade" 10.6 DVD installer and the newer app-based installers might not like installing to a blank partition. I've got a drawer in my office with half a dozen USB sticks rolling around with various flavors of developer preview and other versions of OSX and I haven't had trouble installing with any of them onto an internal or an external HDD partition. In fact