Back in Classic systems it was possible to duplicate an installed system just by dragging the system folder to another volume. Is it still possible in OSX? If so, can I just drag my installed 10.4.6 from a PATA volume to a volume on a SATA disk and expect it to boot if I choose the SATA volume as the startup disk?

it sounds possible
repair permissions afterwords.
and technially, it should work.

im not sure though, but why not try

I think you can boot off the dvd and "restore" the sata drive from the pata drive using disk utility

Nogo trying to do this. I just tried this tonight on my system using Carbon Copy Cloner. I physically removed my PATA drive with OS X installed and restarted my machine. I come up with a b0 error upon boot. Somewhere early in the boot process it needs the driver for your particular SATA chipset

meistersinger

PascalW/Tubgirl OS X 10.4.10 distro.
AMD 64 3500+ CPU
Asus A8V-VM SE (VIA K8M890 Northbridge VIA 8237 Southbridge Realtek 8201 NIC (ViaRhine Driver) Realtek Audio chip (AC-97))
Foxconn ATI Radeon x350 PCIe video
TI-based FireWire Card

My question: Since PascalW based his distro on the image of the MacBook install, how do I get it to see the SATA drive so I can install natively to SATA?