There are also ways to keep using your internal drive (for your system and apps) and seamlessly off-load data to your external drive. Using a USB 2.0 drive as your startup drive will work fine, but it may run slower.Ĭlone your internal drive to your external drive (instead of starting with a clean installation), please post back. Note: This arrangement will work better if the external drive was a FireWire drive, FireWire 800 if your iMac has a FireWire 800 port. You can switch between startup drive by using System Preferences +Startup Disk+ pane. If there is no system on the drive currently, install Mac OS X using the default installation option.Īfter installation, the iMac will start up from your external drive and go through the setup screens. At the Installer screen, target the external drive's volume for the installation.

Insert disc and hold down the C key during startup. Then, all you need to do is start up your iMac using the Mac OS X installation disc. Post back if you have questions about setting up the drive to make it bootable. My current iMac setup is 160GB internal drive (with startup volume), 320GB external FireWire drive for most of my data (some of it is still on the internal), and 750GB external USB drive for my Time Machine backup of my internal and FireWire external.Ĭonnect the external drive and make sure it is initialized with +Partition Map Scheme+ of *GUID Partition Table* and +format type+ of *Mac OS Extended (Journaled)*. The internal SATA connection is the fastest connection you have, so there are performance advantages to using the internal drive for the OS and apps, as long as you can keep plenty of free space on the internal drive. Use the internal drive mostly for the OS and apps. However, off-load most of your user data, such as your +iTunes Music+ folder, to your external drive. That's it.Īs an alternate to starting up from the external drive, you can keep starting up from the internal drive.

Go to System Preferences +Startup Disk+ pane, and change the volume that is used for startup so that the external drive is selected. The resulting external drive will be identical to the internal drive, except for more free space. Once the drive is connected and set up, it should appear on the Mac's desktop. Partition tab to change both the +Partition Map Scheme+ and the If it's an external drive sold for Windows PCs, you need to use the Disk Utility You can use either one.įirst set up the external drive as mentioned in the previous post. SuperDuper (free for basic features - shareware for additional features). There are two cloning utilities, +Carbon Copy Cloner+ (free with optional donation requested by developer) and

Apple external hard drive for imac