Interesting question on creating a bootable drive

[racolvin]

Something in the back of my mind says this is possible but I'm just not sure how to go about it.

Is it possible for me to hook up an external drive to my fully functioning computer and tell my machine to make that drive a fully bootable disk? meaning that it would copy all the currently installed and working KEXTs, etc, etc but NOT my applications and things? Just make it a bootable system disk?

 

[Kaido]

There's a couple ways to do it. One way is to use a cloning app like SuperDuper to clone your existing drive, then manually delete whatever files you don't want. The other way is to install Leopard to the external hard drive (you can launch a software installer while you're using OS X, made exactly for this purpose), but you'll need to boot the drive and run through setup to get it to the desktop (it's the equivalent of installing the DVD, then shutting down - setup hasn't initiated the drive yet, it must be manually booted).

 

[racolvin]

Hmm ... Not sure I followed all of that, particularly that last bit.

What I'm considering is a way allow someone who has the same setup (hardware) that I do to easily get up and running. That way they wouldn't have to do the trial and error bit that I did, since mine is already tweaked 🙂

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: racolvin
Hmm ... Not sure I followed all of that, particularly that last bit.

What I'm considering is a way allow someone who has the same setup (hardware) that I do to easily get up and running. That way they wouldn't have to do the trial and error bit that I did, since mine is already tweaked 🙂

You'd simply clone the hard drive. This copies all of the files plus the bootable information, so all you have to do is plug it into the new system and it will be a 1:1 copy of yours. If you want to remove your files, just go on the cloned drive after you finish cloning it and delete your personal files from it. If it's a Hackintosh, you'll also need to install PC EFI_v9 to the drive after cloning.