mini HD as an 'external' for macbook

[Blobby]

I have the HD from a Mini (whose main board died) in an enclosure connected by firewire to a new macbook. The mini had/has OS 10.4.6; the macbook is 10.5.1. This works ok as an external storage for the macbook. I don't know the condition of the OS on the external drive as one of the accounts has zero size, so some damage must have occurred when the mini died. However, the Macbook's disk verify said the external drive looked OK.

I tried starting the macbook with option held, and selecting the external, but 'About this Mac' still said 10.5.1, so presumably the mini drive's OS won't boot the macbook - but then Tiger wouldn't boot a new Leopard macbook anyway would it?

Anyway, (stupid question alert) if I'm just using the external to backup individual files and extra space, can I literally delete all folders shown in the Finder from it other than 'documents' and 'music'?

Would there be any problems installing Leopard on this external mini drive so I can use it for a full macbook backup/disk image (it's 100G; macbook is 80G)?

 

[spriter]

Personally I would start fresh. Backing up to a drive that you can't be certain is stable is not something I would consider. Load up Disk Utility and wipe it, zero out data to give it a thorough test and go from there.

As for Tiger not booting Leopard MacBooks - I can tell you it does, at least on the first Leopard MacBooks from late last year - albeit with the monitor/display fixed on max brightness and no resolution options or calibrations. This is because Tiger doesn't have the X3100 driver. You can play around copying the drivers back from Leopard to Tiger but it just gives an error. I know this because I bought my Nov' 07 MacBook and had a mirrored copy of my old Rev. A MacBook ready to boot from.

Why not let Time Machine backup your MacBook to the external drive? You have the option to restore from a TM backup when you install the OS and get much more up-to-date backups. However, if you're looking for zero downtime and a mirrored bootable drive with something like SuperDuper! then again I'd wipe it with Disk Utility and not Finder. This loses to TM in the frequency stakes, though.

 

[Blobby]

OK, thanks a lot for that, spriter.

 

[cherry su]

if you want tiger on the macbook (from the mac mini drive) you have to get the GMAX3100.kext (i dunno if you need the tiger version) onto the mac mini drive