I'm adding Mavericks to a 2009 MacBook Pro on behalf of the Mac User Group. The trick was to get 6.4 GB of updates across to the new partition (it'll be a dual-boot, Snow Leopard & Mavericks) in a reasonable timeframe. The updates were on a USB 3·0 stick but the target Mac is USB 2·0/FireWwire 800 only.
But I have an adaptor cable with FW 800 at one end & SATA drive interface at the other, and another similar one with USB 3·0 instead of FW. Add a 120 GB SSD to the mix, now it's getting easier.
Copy from the thumb drive to the SSD via the MacBook Air, took about a minute for the transfer. Remove the SSD from the USB adaptor & connect it to the FW one. Plug that into the target Mac & initiate the transfer.
Only took two minutes to move the 6.4 GB updates across, was going to take longer over USB 2·0. So now Mavrix is trying to install itself onto the larger of the two partitions of the non-standard 320 GB 7,200 rpm HD in the old MBP.