SL on a USB drive to play Starcraft on Lion

Hey Guys,

My girlfriend just got a new MBP with Lion. She and I like to play the old Blizzard games (Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, etc) fairly often. Thus enter the problem of PowerPC and Rossetta are no longer supported.

From what I understand you can instal a copy of Snow Leopard (SL) to a USB flash drive, plug it in, boot to it, install PowerPC games, and have fun. (I know you can just Boot Camp the computer, but Windows 7 license is $100. Yes, Lion is "Bootcamp 4" which only works with W7. A 16GB flash drive is $20)

Here's were I am running into problems. It seem that using my MBP (from mid 2010 running SL 10.6.8) wont boot from a SL install disk for me to install it onto a USB Flash Drive. When I turn on the computer hit option, the DVD boot disk shows up as an option. I click on it to boot from the DVD, the disk drive spins up, but then stops, and the system just sits there frozen. I tried to make a boot USB Flash drive, with the same result. (USB Flash drive shows up, but when selected the system freezes) I've tried resetting the PRAM, but to no success

This is a legal copy of SL. I bought to upgrade a leopard MBP whose logic board crashed. So it's pretty worthless now.

So I guess I what I'm asking is. Is there something wrong with my system that it wont boot from a OS X instal DVD? Is it impossible to use a newer MBP to install an older copy of SL on to USB flash drive? Would a Lion system even boot from an USB SL system (Evidence from other forum's suggests it would).

Any feed back would be appreciated.

First off, you don't even want to try and play a game off a system booted from a USB thumb drive. The performance would be incredibly poor. I have an emergency boot disk loaded with some utilities, and just booting up takes something like 3 or 4 minutes. Maybe longer. Launching an app takes 30+ seconds. I wouldn't even want to think about how gawdawful a game would be in that environment.

As for why your system won't boot Snow Leopard… are you SURE it's a retail disc? Those are black. The OEM ones that ship with new Macs are gray and are only good on the exact model they shipped with.

If you can get your install disc booting issues sorted, consider partitioning your drive, install SL to the new partition, and simply dual-boot off that.

Fair enough about gaming on a USB, I remember reading that the speeds weren't terrible, but that's probably comparing running other things off of a USB flash drive. I was also thinking that since its flash memory and the systems RAM is so large, things would work out fine. But of course, I wasn't thinking about the actual read/write speed through a USB connection which is what will kill the speed, right?

As far as the other problem, booting from a OS DVD. I the disk I have for Leopard is grey, but I purchased it from an apple store. It worked fine upgrading my old leopard system till 2 weeks later the logic board crashed. It shows up as a vialable disk to boot from, but the disk drive seems to stop spinning.

The OEM that came with my 13" MBP should allow me to boot to it right? or am i just crazy? I could have sworn I booted to it and ran disk utility when my hard drive crashed in February. I'm also pretty sure when I botched an install of XP for a boot camp partition, I used the OEM disk to reinstall SL and then restored my time machine.

In summation. Fair point about try to game on USB, I'll look at putting SL on her system as dual boot (I assume create a partition, using boot camp, and then install to that?) Should I be concerned that I can't boot my MBP from it's OEM DVD?

You did say a new MBP? You cannot go further back than the original system supplied with the machine in most cases. lack of drivers etc. If it came with Lion that is where you may be staying.

And discs from another machine will never work unless the models are identical.

No, gf's has a new lion MBP system. I very much understand the lack of driver support etc.

I still have my original SL MBP system and OEM Disk. MY SL MBP will not boot from it's OEM DVD.

When I pop it in the drive and the system is on, can read the DVD. Restarting the computer and holding option results in only the HDD as a choice to boot from. Should I be able to boot a SL system from the grey SL DVD that came with it?

Lostman898 said:

When I pop it in the drive and the system is on, can read the DVD. Restarting the computer and holding option results in only the HDD as a choice to boot from. Should I be able to boot a SL system from the grey SL DVD that came with it?

Click to expand...

Bleah. Nevermind my initial reply.

Can you try an external DVD drive? Also try resetting the PRAM.