USB booting macbook snow leopard harddrive on Intel laptop

Hi Everyone,

I am quite new to the Mac world here and consequently have the following question. Can I take a Macbook 80GB SATA HD with a bootable Snow Leopard installation on it, and plug the drive into a USB / SATA HD enclosure and boot Mac OS X off an Intel-based laptop?

The target laptop is a Dell D830 series unit with a 2.0GHz T7250 duo core chip with 4GB RAM. The BIOS on this laptop supports USB boots. While probably not relevant with this technical configuration, the processor does has the VT extensions which I had tried to exploit when I was trying to get Leopard (or Snow Leopard) installed in VMWare Workstation (that's a completely different, painful, and ultimately unsuccessful story). While I recognize the USB 2.0 interface may/will be a performance bottleneck, I am just looking at proof of concept at this point as my Dell laptop also supports Firewire 800 so if I can get things working on USB it would/could justify a Firewire 800/SATA HD enclosure. Please only respond if you have a technical contribution and please do not bother questioning why I want to do this and why don't I just run it in a macbook, etc. At the end of the day, I am just interested in understanding what the technical challenges are and whether its possible and if its not, why not.

Thanks in advance for your technical responses.

AG

radiowhiz said:

Can I take a Macbook 80GB SATA HD with a bootable Snow Leopard installation on it, and plug the drive into a USB / SATA HD enclosure and boot Mac OS X off ... a Dell D830 series unit with a 2.0GHz T7250 duo core chip with 4GB RAM.

Click to expand...

No.
Also, discussion of booting/running OS X on any computer other than an Apple computer is not allowed on these forums.

formal definition of an "apple" computer

Hi All,

What is the definition of an "apple" computer? specific processor chipset? mobo? bios? combination thereof? I am new to mac ... but can you not piece together and build mac computers like the pc world?

Thx,
AG

radiowhiz said:

Hi All,

What is the definition of an "apple" computer? specific processor chipset? mobo? bios? combination thereof? I am new to mac ... but can you not piece together and build mac computers like the pc world?

Thx,
AG

Click to expand...

It's not difficult to understand.
An "Apple" computer is one that is produced, manufactured and sold by Apple, Inc. or any of its authorized resellers.

There is no B.Y.O. option for an Apple computer.