Can I put my Mac w/non-free debian skolelinux 8.1 SSD directly into new Lenovo PC? Or better yet how do I properly build a usb installer with debian iso image i've tried
fdisk
dd
I've tried as well as
cp
My new Thinkpad doesn't have a disk drive. My mac is a MBP 8,1 the Thinkpad is a 550s
You don't format hard drives with ISO images. ISO images are cdrom disk images. If you dump an ISO image raw onto a hard drive, it won't be able to boot.
There's not a "right way" to do this as much as a way to install really complicated boot stubs which can understand ISO images. So getting the ISO in the disk is less than a quarter of the problem.
I suspect mac != dell, particularly given the very different ways macs and pc's handle disk partitions.
I already got everything booted and loaded on the mac. 43,003 packages. the SSD boots an runs great with both amd64 (x86_64) and the i386 (x86) images but I have recently switched to the i386 OS because I believe it's proper to run the (x86) (both are intel i7's) my question however is can i just swap the current SSD I have built and running with the stock lenovo HDD that comes with it that has 7 Proffesional preloaded? Or do I have to create a bootable USB being that the lenovo comes without an optical drive?? I have the grub common and the grub pc loaded currently.
This is incorrect, you should be running x86_64. i386 is 32-bit, and by running a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit system you pass up a great part of the advantage it has. I don't think Intel has made any 32-bit personal computers in quite some time, even the Atom is 64-bit now.
I think you will have problems due to a Mac's different kind of BIOS expecting a different kind of partition table.
I recently switched to Ubuntu 15.04 64bit which is a x86_64 .I built a usb Installer using startup disk creator, I did build it on my Mac but my Lenovo PC arrived today and is bein delivered this evening will this be acceptable to install with. It's not a pure Debian but it's still Debian so I'll run with that for now I think and try to create a GNU/Linux skole'linux deb. or get an external DVD RW like previously advised.