Booting Snow Leopard from external drive

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Because I jumped the gun and installed Lion before all of my third party app providers were ready for it, I thought I'd install Snow Leopard on an external hard drive and boot Snow Leopard when I needed to use said apps. I have a 1tb Seagate external hard drive (fresh out of the box). Using the fire wire, I divided the Seagate into three partitions, formatting all three for MAC OS extended (journaled). I cloned Snow Leopard and restored it to the first partition. All seemed to be going well but ... when I rebooted my Mac Pro, holding down the option key, the only options presented were the MAC hd (Lion) and the MAC hd restore (for Lion). No external drive was in the mix.

I chose the MAC hd and booted normally into Lion to check to see if the external was even being recognized and it was.

So, what did I do wrong? :Shouting:
 
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Is the external drive have a GUID rather than MBR boot sector? Macs can only boot from GUID discs.
 

bobtomay

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Your Mac's Specs
15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
And the Intel Macs are not suppose to boot from Apple Partition Map schemes, but I've got an external partitioned that way (before I knew any better) and it will boot Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard from my SD! clones on my '06 MBP.
 
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It's been a few days and Snow Leopard on the external drive is a beautiful thing to behold. Until apps adjust to Lion, booting Snow Leopard is the way to go.
;D
 

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