I have encountered a few issues trying to get OSX 10.6 installed on my Dell Vostro but mainly because of the ICH9 chipset causing a panic on start up. This is why most tutorials find it best to use a thumb drive or flash drive to get past any errors in installation. Unfortunately once you get past installation you will still need to be able to boot from that drive without it going into panic.
I grabbed a 250GB drive and installed it into HDD enclosure. I created the partitions I needed in the mac Disk Utility for each partition I wanted to have an install for. The size of which is just enough to hold the image. The remaining space is free for utilities or other files.
To start I did a restore of both my 10.5.6 and my 10.6 images to their respective partitions. Then I patched the drive with EP45UD3P.dmg so I can pick and choose the partition to load on startup. There is an excellent lifehacker guide that you should use as a frame for this guide. After your restore is completed run the file you downloaded and pick the leopard install partition. This will be recognized as a USB Mass storage device instead of a SATA HDD which will allow you to boot with no panic. Boot into your 10.6 partition on the external drive and install Snow Leopard to the same external HDD. Make sure you make space for the OS to intall. Please note that some Dell Vostro users reported success switching from IDE to RAID when their drives are not detected. Some cases not all.
What you will need
1. Hard Drive (Space will vary based on your needs)
2. Copies of each OS you will use
3. Partitions (Based on how many OS you want)
4. HDD enclosure. (For booting HDD when you want to do installs)
5. Time to spare.
UPDATE
This is only partially working. It will boot fine but then it will freeze after a few minutes and shutoff. I dont know if this is happening to others. I will see if I can work around this.
UPDATE 2
Ok I have it fully functional now from the USB Drive as I am posting this update from snow leopard. What I did differently this time was I installed it directly on top of an existing OS X install opposed to a fresh install. Next I will take this out of the enclosure an put it back in the dell to see if it will boot with out usb.
UPDATE 3
Ok none of my SATA drives are being detected. Causes Panic when connected without usb enclosure.
Tags: 410, Dell, Enclosure, External, HDD, Install, Kernel, Leopard, Panic, Snow, Snowleopard, Vostro