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
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