A question about booting from a USB thumbdrive...

[PlasticScalpel]

Is it possible to install Leopard onto a USB thumbdrive, plug it into an unhacked Pentium 4 PC and boot from it?

 

I am a long time Apple user and am persistently disappointed at work using everything from Windows 98 through 2000 to XP. More and more people at work are wanting to know whether they should think about buying a Mac themselves and I would love to be able to show them the Mac OS X.

 

I can give little specifics from my work PCs but I do know none of them are likely to be above Pentium 4. I appreciate that booting from a thumbdrive and running of Mac OS on old/slow computers is likely to be a very slow and painful process but I would love to be able to show people iPhoto, QuickLook, Spotlight, iCal, iChat, Dashboard etc. I would love to demonstrate the integration between applications too.

 

I have a 4 Gb thumdrive and desire plugging this into a Pentium 4 and then entering BIOS and choosing to boot from the USB drive. I have a Macbook Pro and a Powerbook onto which I installed a downloaded version of leopard - 9A581.

 

Please, if anyone can help, I would really appreciate it. I am sure this, if it could work, would be of interest to many others too.

 

Thanks in advance, PlasticScalpel

[nepersonne]

It is possible. Well, somewhat. I'm currently booting from a 16GB thumbdrive because I cannot get OsX to see the HD on my laptop. BUT.... I am using 10.5.6 iPC distro, AND I had installed it on a USB HD prior so I knew pretty much which kernels were working (after several trial and errors.)

 

It is currently running off the thumb drive, but it is MUCH slower than the USB HD.

 

So, short answer - yes it's possible. Long answer - it's not ideal.