can you boot up from the startup disk of a different model mac?

Hi, I would like to make a clone of a macbook pro drive and clone it over to different machines. The machines will all be either core 2 duo's, i5's or i7's and the os will be snow leopard. will this work or does the snow leopard installer install only machine specific system files? thanks!

You'll want to have an image for each machine family/generation. I have multiple images created for 2009 MBPs, 2011 MBPs with Sandy Bridge, 2010 MBAs and 2011 MBAs with Sandy Bridge. The hardware varies enough, I don't trust images from one generation to work properly on the next.

Thanks for the response! Does anyone know exactly what it is that makes one install different from the next? Since you can install osx from a retail dvd on any machine, the retail disc has all the files necessary to install on any machine. Could you just copy ALL of the system files off the install dvd and have an overkill startup disc that would work on multiple systems?

Drivers for starters. If they were all MacBooks may well work, but not for say MacBooks, iMacs or Mac Pros.

Cloning would not be the way to go. While a retail disc may have all the drivers for the Macs manufactured up to that point, not sure it actually installs every one of them on every individual install.

You could clone to an external - put a clean install on each machine with the discs for each, then use Migration Assistant to pull everything from your clone.

Correction - the retail version of the OS contains drivers for devices built before its release. Machines released afterwards may not be supported by the retail disk. We saw this often with newer computers unable to boot to the retail version of 10.6.x.

Im also researching system image utility, does anyone have experience with this tool? Can I add third party software installation to a workflow?