Installing Leopard on an external HDD (Intel Mac)

Im still waiting for the CCC to finish cloning my main HDD, so I thought I'd use the time to document the procedure I used to install Leopard on my external HDD, as Ive noticed on the net that a few people seem to be having problems with this. So lets get started;

Stage 1 - Prepare the disk

1. Connect your external disk to your mac while running OS X (You should be able to do this via disk utility when booted from the DVD but I didnt try this myself).
   
2. Start Disk Utility
   
3. Select the physical disk in Disk Utility, make sure to select the disk and not the volume.
   
4. Next click on the Partition tab
   
5. Under Volume Scheme select "One partition" (or however many you need just keep about 12GB for Leopard).
   
6. Next click the options button and for the partition type, select GUID.
   
7. In the name field, enter a name for your disk
8. Now click Apply, after a couple of minutes the disk should be prepared for installing Leopard.
   

Stage 2 - Installation of Leopard

1. Insert the Leopard DVD and click the Install Leopard icon
   
2. Restart the computer when asked
   
3. After a fairly slow startup (its booting from the DVD) the installer will load
   
4. In the first window you see, you'll be asked to select the installation language, choose whatever is appropriate for you.
   
5. Next read and accept the EULA
   
6. On the next screen after the EULA, you should see a list of Harddisk icons, including your external drive
   
7. Select your external drive
   
8. At the bottom of the window, you should see a button labelled "Options", click this.
   
9. You will now be presented with a list of the install options for Leopard, as the external drive is blank, there will be an Install option in first place instead of upgrade, the second option, archive and install will be greyed out and the third option, Erase and Install will also be available. Choose whichever option you prefer and click ok, I chose Install.
   
10. Click continue
    
11. On the next screen, click the customize button at the bottom, this will allow you to further customize your installation. You will be presented with a list of options for printer drivers, languages, fonts etc. go through the lists and disabled options you dont need, for example you can get rid of languages you wont use or printer drivers which helps to save space.
    
12. Click Done
    
13. Click Install
    
14. If you have done this once already, then there is no need to repeat the DVD verification step, so just click Skip
    
15. Now we just need to wait for the install, mine started off at 54 minutes but dropped down to 39 minutes quite quickly, then up to 1 hour, then back down to 34 minutes before settling down.
    

TIP: If you want to see what is going on during this stage, from the menu bar at the top, select "Window" - "Installer Log", when the window opens you can choose between three options from the pulldown menu - Show errors only, Show errors and progress, Show all logs. Choose one of these and you'll see whats going on during the installation and still have the progress bar visible beneath the log window.

Install complete after about 45 minutes in total.

After the reboot, the Leopard Welcome movie starts playing fullscreen (for me after the upgrade that I did originally, it played in a window only, so the fullscreen was nice).

Stage 3 - Post-Installation Account Customization

Almost done now, just a couple more steps left.

1. Select the language you want to use for the operating system.
   
2. Next choose the keyboard you would like.
   
3. On the next screen you'll be asked whether you want to migrate any information, there are four choices;

• Migrate from another Mac
  
• another volume on this Mac
  
• from a Time Machine backup
  
• do not transfer my information now
  

If this is a new mac, then select the option, do not transfer my information now. Otherwise pick the option thats best for you. Here I selected migrate from another volume on this mac.

If you select a migration option, then the Transfer your account window appears, here you select the drive that you would like to migrate your information from in the pulldown menu. After the installer finishes scanning the disk, it will display the amount of data available to transfer, for example, User account 35GB and so on.

Tick the boxes here next to the information that you would like to transfer, unfortunately my external drive is smaller than my internal so I wasnt able to migrate my user account, just my applications and network settings.

Click ok and then after a few minutes you will be booted into the desktop with your settings migrated and ready to use Leopard.

Dont forget to go into the preference pane - security - firewall section and turn your firewall on!