When I installed Snow Leopard on my 8Gb Patriot Xporter XT (...faaast drive, by the way) I did the installation and much configuration on my FW HD and then cloned it over, retaining the installation on my FW (Edit: on a dedicated partition, of course) for future updates, etc; I don't remember how long the installation took to complete, but it wasn't out of the ordinary.
Your four-hour installation story is hair-raising, because not being able to do one I never gave any thought to how long a direct installation onto the flash drive might take. (Writing to a USB 2.0 flash drive is not a fast procedure [I'd hate to have to find out about USB 1.0.], and cloning SL to my flash drive takes 2- 3 times as long as cloning it to my FW.)
It took 20 minutes (with CCC) to clone it (It's 3.4Gb.), and it takes about a minute from the chime to boot my Early 2009 White MacBook/2.0GHz Core 2 Duo/4Gb RAM/OS X 10.5.7 (Build 9J61)...not too bad at all, but working with it once it's booted is excruciatingly slow.
I suggest that you follow my procedure if you still intend to follow through with your plan.
I've absolutely -0- idea what happened with your icon, but if that was your only issue I suggest that you just live with it. (You can always change it if it's only a matter of aesthetics.)
Last edited by artie505; 05/22/10 09:11 AM. Reason: Range of 4Gb --> 3.4Gb
