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 Installing Leopard from external USB2 DVD drive? 
 
 
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Old 01-11-2007, 02:51 PM
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Installing Leopard from external USB2 DVD drive?
Can anyone tell me - can you install Leopard from an external USB2 DVD drive? The superdrive in my Macbook pro doesn't work.
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Old 01-11-2007, 02:59 PM
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You should be able to...?
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Old 01-11-2007, 03:04 PM
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I thought it has to be firewire to detect on startup.
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Old 01-11-2007, 03:08 PM
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I'm not 100% certain, but I believe Boofhead is right.

The easiest way to test it would be to pop your 105 DVD into the external drive, restart the Mac, and hold the option key down. This will (eventually) bring up the volume loader screen, showing you icons of every bootable volume that the MacBook can see. If you don't see a disc icon showing you your 10.5 DVD, then no, you can't boot from USB opticals.


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Old 01-11-2007, 03:18 PM
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Should work fine. I installed once from a USB HD which had been restored to from an image of Leopard.
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Old 01-11-2007, 03:25 PM
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So from what I can tell, I may need to hold option down when I reboot the macbook. Either that or do a 'restore to' to an external USB2 HD from the Leopard disk.
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Old 01-11-2007, 03:54 PM
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If you can borrow a 2nd mac during installation and a firewire cable, don't worry about putting it on the USB drive.
Put the DVD in the spare mac, shut it down and reboot holding 'T' to start it in FW mode.
Then connect the 2 macs using FireWire cable, restart your Mac holding 'option' and select the DVD.
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Old 01-11-2007, 04:25 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by danno74 View Post
Can anyone tell me - can you install Leopard from an external USB2 DVD drive? The superdrive in my Macbook pro doesn't work.
All Intel Macs can boot from practically all USB storage devices (including USB Flash drives,) some USB to PATA/SATA bridges may not work, but they are usually the stupidly cheap ones...

(Easiest/fastest way to install Leopard in a small/medium office, 8GiB USB Flash drive, especially fast ones like the Verbatim Store 'n' Go Pro, up to 20MiBps and averaging 14MiBps, considerably faster than most DVD drives.)
Last edited by sendai; 01-11-2007 at 04:34 PM.
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Old 02-11-2007, 08:36 AM
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Well, I tried it last night - got to beginning the installer - it started installing and then had an error and stopped. From that point on, it wouldn't allow me to install Leopard on my Macbook because it said I needed to format the HD first... the thing is, the hard drive is already formatted in HFS extended (journaled) format... which is what the installer said it wasn't! Grrrrr....
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