[Abbas]

Basically, I have two problems:

1) I have a MacBook Pro and an Intel Mac Mini. Unfortunately, I cant find the installation disks that came with the mini and when I use the MBP disks, I get a message saying this O/S cannot be installed on your system

2) The reason I wanted to format Mini is that I recently bought the Maxtor One Touch II 300GB Hard Drive and I want to use this as my primary drive instead of the Mini's 60GB slow drive. I want to format the Maxtor and install OS X on it however, I'm not sure how to make it the startup disk.

I've already formatted it with Mac OS Extented (Journaled) option but when I click on the Startup Disk in System Prefs, this disk is not shown. However, it does appear on my Desktop just fine.

So my two questions are:

1) How do I make the Firewire drive as a Startup Disk
2) How can I install OSX using the MBP DVD on the Mini.

If (2) is not possible, can I move OSX from my internal 2.5" drive to the Maxtor and boot from it?

Thanks
-a

[JKT]

You can only choose your external as a start up disk once you have installed the OS on it.

To do so, connect it to your MBP, run the installer and pick the external as the target destination for the installation. It is as simple as that.

[rjt1000]

Originally Posted by JKT 

You can only choose your external as a start up disk once you have installed the OS on it.

To do so, connect it to your MBP, run the installer and pick the external as the target destination for the installation. It is as simple as that.

Actually, its more complicated than that. First you have to format the disk in the right format to be bootable on intel Macs.

This article gives the details:

TidBITS: Booting an Intel iMac from an External Drive

Once you do that, you can use Disk Utility or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the Mini's drive to the Maxtor. Then choose the Maxtor in System Prefs--> Startup Disk.

[Dr. DDS]

Yes, format with disk utility your firewire drive than use carbon copy or superduper (i use it) to do a complete copy of your disk to your ext drive. in this process superduper makes the ext drive bootable.
After that, boot from the ext drive (hold option key when starts up and in system preferences you can choose yout start-up disk)
SuperDuper is free.

[Abbas]

Thanks- that TidBits article with the Partitioning surely helped make the drive a bootable one for Intel Macs. And then Carbon Copy took care of the rest.

-a