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bohdanz · Nov 24, 2006, 07:36 PM

I bought a 4GB hard drive and hopde to have the Mac OS system on it (heard you can launch the Mac using the Option key during startup - is that true?)

Tried using Carbon Copy Cloner last night to put the system on the USB stick but it would not work?

Do I need to drag it on the USB drive?

Really need help.
Thanks.

Angus_D · Nov 24, 2006, 07:43 PM

No, you can't boot off USB devices.

tooki · Nov 24, 2006, 07:44 PM

Intel Macs can.

tooki

bohdanz · Nov 24, 2006, 08:19 PM

Tooki,

So would I just drag the System onto the USB stick?
Thanks in advance.

CharlesS · Nov 24, 2006, 08:35 PM

No, we unfortunately lost that ability in the OS X transition. You'd need to install it onto the USB stick from the install discs.

Also, not all USB devices are bootable - it's not guaranteed that it'll work.

Finally, USB drives have a limited number of writes, and I suspect that having the swap files, Spotlight indexes, etc. constantly being written to the flash drive would cause it to wear out a lot sooner.

monkeybrain · Nov 25, 2006, 06:06 AM

Maybe if it's on USB flash you won't Spotlight on anyway, since I guess you might use it on more than one machine? Or at least limit Spotlight to Home folder only. Maybe sway files sizes can be altered in some way? Also, couldn't it cause problems if you put the USB drive in a machine with a different configuration, i.e. a Macbook compared to a MacPro?

Isn't this the Home on an iPod thing or something?

JKT · Nov 25, 2006, 07:36 AM

I would be very reluctant to install OS X on a 4GB sized hard drive. Even if you don't install all the extras (printer drivers, languages, fonts etc), the majority of the drive will be taken up by the system. Add the swap and temporary files on top of that and you will potentially need more space to run the OS than is left available.

Angus_D · Nov 25, 2006, 08:41 AM

Originally Posted by tooki

Intel Macs can.

News to me... I guess I don't pay enough attention these days

chabig · Nov 25, 2006, 08:43 AM

I'm confused. Is this a hard drive or a flash drive?

tooki · Nov 25, 2006, 12:19 PM

Doesn't matter -- USB hard disks and flash drives use the same drivers.

Bohdanz, you will still need to install using the Mac OS X installer or Carbon Copy Cloner, because the Finder will not copy the invisible system files that are necessary for booting.

Historical perspective: AGP Macs that can boot Mac OS 9 can boot Mac OS 9 from USB -- but not OS X.

tooki

CharlesS · Nov 25, 2006, 04:14 PM

Originally Posted by monkeybrain

Maybe if it's on USB flash you won't Spotlight on anyway, since I guess you might use it on more than one machine? Or at least limit Spotlight to Home folder only. Maybe sway files sizes can be altered in some way? Also, couldn't it cause problems if you put the USB drive in a machine with a different configuration, i.e. a Macbook compared to a MacPro?

Isn't this the Home on an iPod thing or something?

Well, regardless of whether you use Spotlight or not, the system's going to be doing its indexing thing in the background automatically. You can disable it by adding the whole drive to the Privacy part of the Spotlight pane, but then you won't be able to do any searches at all, even for filename. Plus, the VM will still be writing those swapfiles, which could be a bigger problem than Spotlight altogether, and there's not much really that you can do about that...