Intel Mac :: Unable To Boot When USB 3 Drive Attached
Apr 23, 2012
I have a 2TB Hitachi Backup drive, and a 1TB Verbatim Portable drive, both are USB 3, and when they are connected and the iMac is switched off, it will not boot until I remove the drive.
How can I leave the 2TB drive connected and power up the iMac ?
The 2TB drive was purchased to be a Time Machine backup drive.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 - 8GB
I ran the Boot Camp Assistant to partition my hard drive, and it successfully created the "BOOTCAMP" drive. When it asked for my installation CD, I tried loading a Windows 7 installation partition through a USB hard drive, but the assistant would not recognize it as an install disk. So, I closed out of the assistant early, leaving the Boot Camp partition in place but Windows non-installed. Eventually, I rebooted my machine in an attempt to boot directly from the USB drive and resume installation.
However, I found the machine will not boot at all. It powers on normally, makes the startup sound, but after a few seconds I'm left with just a flashing folder and question mark icon. Holding down Option-key at startup does nothing. Trying to boot from my Snow Leopard disc by holding down C or D during startup does nothing. Holding down Command-S does nothing. Holding down Shift-key does nothing. Resetting the PRAM does nothing. I have also tried booting from a Windows 7 install DVD -- the drive spends an extra 20 seconds or so scanning the disk, but then skips directly to the flashing question mark.
What can I do? Is there some way I can access the EFI to make sure the correct startup disk is selected? Why am I unable to boot from my CD drive?
My internal 1TB hard drive on my iMac is dead and I don't have the money to replace it at the moment. I have everything backed up on an external 1TB drive using Time Machine. As a workaround for the time being,Is there any way I can install the system on the external drive and use that as the boot drive without erasing the Time Machine Backups? It seems to me I would have to have two partitions for the external drive, one for the system, and one for Time Machine. But is there any way to add a partition without erasing the existing one with Time Machine only on it?
Two years ago I installed Leopard on a pair of striped Fantom Hard Drives (3TBs) via Firewire 800, and have been running my 2007 Macbook Pro off it ever since. When Snow Leopard came out, I updated it with no problems. When Lion came out, again no problems. Last month I bought a CalDigit VR2 with dual hard drives (4TBs) specifically built for running OS externally. But no matter how I configure, install, or connect... it will not boot up my Macbook Pro, or my Macbook Air.
Last week I bought a new Fantom external hard drive (1.5TBs) and discovered the same exact issue, with one exception... the Fantom will boot the Macbook Pro via USB 2.0, but only when plugged into the left side port.
Has anyone else noticed this change?
P.S. I've talked to the people at CalDigit, Fantom, and Apple, and no one seems to have an answer.
OS X 10.4.3 IMAC Intel Core Duo. I backed up my HD on an external drive so I could upgrade to Snow Leopard. I wanted to test that I could boot from the external drive and selected it as my start up drive. When I did a restart I got the Apple and the turning gear and then suddenly a black screen with this on it: "May 28 22:23:11 Launched:com.apple.nibindd:respawning too quickly throttling, exited system abnormally bad system call too many failures in succession I have no name!"
I tried several dozen times with no luck. I think when I made the copy of my HD on the external HD I may have neglected to make it "bootable" (moving too quickly). My internal CDROM is busted so I use an external CDROM. I can't boot from it at all with the proper start up buttons pushed. It keeps trying to boot from the external drive. If I turn the external drive off and try to boot from the external CD I just get the grey file with the ? in the middle of it.
I tried using another external HD I have with OS 10.4 on it, but it won't recognize it either with fan, alt, shift, delete pressed at start up. My internal drive (a Seagate 2 tarabite drive) works great, but how do I reset it as the start up drive when I'm stuck with this black screen. One more thing, when I try to reset PRAM I don't get a second gong.
I have two new G-Drives attached via FW800. One drive keeps unmounting by itself. All of a sudden, I get a screen that says "The drive has been removed, you should always make sure to eject the drive properly from the etc etc.." First time I have ever had this problem. I have tried the eSATA connection and FW connection with the same result. Regardless on how I connect the drive, linked or direct. It's brand new. Could it be bad?
It is a 2008 intel iMac that had worked fine for the last four years until lion. Everytime there was and update or I rebooted, my Mac would freeze at some point of the login. A permission repair or just repair disk would solve the issue an everyone and a while, a restore from backup. Recently my Mac started to slow down to the point it froze for several hours and force quit would never open. I held the button and since then I have been in trouble. The repair permissions had a ton of errors but successfully repaired. But when I repaired the disk, it's hit a couple of errors but ultimately failed right after "Invalid Node Structure" that error has been consistent every time I have attempted a fix and it failed. I tried restoring from a backup to no avail. Then I wiped the drive and installed Lion (after a convienient 5 hours download) an it booted. I tried using it but it was extremely slow, let it sit over night and came back to it frozen. I had assumed it was slow due to indexing but after 12ish hours this didn't solve the issue. I clicked the apple button and it took a while to finally show up an restarted. Fro
There is wouldn't complete the boot. Froze at the apple logo or white screen with spinning mouse. Left that for several hours and stayed there. Tried repair and same issue. "ivalid node structure" redtating aftet that it just reboots and turns off a little bit after the chime. I have tried everything I could find on different forums without any success. I tried single user mode with the fsck commands and that failed also. I downloaded lion and made a recovery flash drive from another computer. I have since installed several new installations of lion after an erase and repartition. I took it to the apple store and they installed a fresh install of lion and it worked for a day then slowed down and froze. I would like to try everything possible before claiming the hardrive dead. I forgot to mention I have done PRAM resets in between the events I described as well as the SCM i think reset by unplugging. I have left it unplugged for over 12 hours, also have taken out all peripherals minus keyboard and mouse.
I have an USB external HD attached to Time Capsule. Trying to find out how one can use diskutil to do a verifyVolume on this drive. I tried something like: diskutil verifyVolume /Volumes/myDrive but it didn't work. The command is (naturally) ok with an USB external HD attached to the USB port on the Mac itself.
I downloaded a video driver (size 77.6 MB) and I saw it in my iMAC "downloads". Now that I've downloaded it, and closed the downloads list, I cannot find how to reopen that download list. How do I do it?
Also, I want to transfer (copy and paste?) that video file downloaded executable file to an attached external hard drive connected to my iMAC which I will use to install the video driver on a PC which is in process of a clean install of Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.
I have a 2tb MyBook connected to my 27" iMac (also has a 2TB internal HDD). The external backs up the iMac but I am still nervous and feel like I want one more layer of redundancy. Is it possible to connect an external drive to my AEBS and have that drive back up the drive attached to the iMac? By the way, the iMac is connected via ethernet to the AEBS.
I have an iMac with a directly attached USB drive and a Mac PowerBook attached via WIFI to the same network. I would like to have both devices back up to the shared drive via Time Machine. To date I have been able to get this to work, in a limited fashion. As soon as the iMac goes to sleep the PowerBook cannot see the drive and the backup fails. I would think that since I have selected the power option on the iMac to wake up for network access that this should work. This sounds like a simple requirement, I tryed to attach the USB drive to my Airport Extreme and we all know that that does not work.
While uninstalling Safari 4 beta it freezed and after 15 minutes of waiting I made a forced restart. Now Mac mini shows the grey screen and won't boot.
What I've tried:
- Disk Utility from restore DVD - fsck in Single-User Mode - resetting PRAM - resetting PMU
I got this big hard drive and attached it to my Airport Extreme. I can get to it just fine, however, I would ideally like to make it so this drive is ALWAYS mounted on my computer. I've got my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on here, and it seems like every time I wake my computer or reboot, I need to reconnect to the drive, otherwise iTunes/iPhoto freak out because they can't find it. Is there a way I can tell my Mac to stay connected to the drive, and automatically look for it if it's not mounted?
I am enjoying my Time Capsule and have kept it in front of me for the last week to see how it behaves. I have noticed that when I attach my other external hard drive to it it will behave exactly like the Time Capsule. By this I mean that after 2 minutes of inactivity they will both spin down but when it is backup time in an hour both will start up simultaneously and my attached external hard drive will get to speed and instantly shut off again while the TC does it's thing. My questions are, can this be stopped and why is it doing this? Surely it would not spin up the external drive along with the TC as spinning it up 12 times a day isn't doing the external drive any favors...
I have made sure my Mac hard drive is the main one which it is, i formatted it and also repaired it and nothing is working.
I have an HP and a Seagate external hard drive hooked up to my mac also and the Verbatim is the one that gives me the issue so I dont know whats happening..
Currently I'm upgrading from Leopard to Lion (via Snow Leopard) on both an iMac and MacBook Pro (both Intel), but before I proceed with the OSX upgrade I wanted to back everything up. Thus far I have partitioned an external firewire drive (G Drive - one that is bootable), and cloned each machine using Carbon Copy Cloner to it's own partition (both GUID). There is plenty of space left over on each partition, and is Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
The issue - I can boot the OS X from the external drive on the MacBook Pro but not on the iMac.
When I restart and hold down Option on the iMac the only drive that appears is the HDD, not the other two drives that are visible if I boot up on the MacBook Pro. On the iMac in System Prefs > Startup Disc I can see all 3 drives but when I select it and restart, the machine freezes on the grey loading screen and goes no further.
Not that it should make a difference, but there is a 3rd partition on the external drive that is currently empty (for extra storage).
I have purchased my first Mac Pro.I also am looking at buying a PCIe SSD to use as the home drive (boot). Since SSD drives are a zillion dollars, I can only afford a 120 gb drive. This will hold all my applications just fine, but the issue is with all the "extras" that go with these applications such as:
- Motion media & templates - DVD Studio Pro templates - Soundtrack Pro loops and samples - music files (for iTunes) - photos (for iPhoto) - emails (for Mail)
Is it possible to download my OS and applications to the SSD, but route all the extra media, music, photos, emails, etc. to another hard drive? As far as I remember, the OS automatically puts items like the iPhoto library and iTunes music on the same hard drive as the appliciation, which could be a problem if those files continue to grow. Same with the Pro Apps.I don't recall that Motion or DVD SP give you the option of putting the extra media on a separate drive.
I have a Drobo hung via USB off my airport extreme. When I first connected it, the Drobo was formatted to be 2 tb but has since grown to over 6 tb in capacity. Now, one of the great things about Drobo is whenever you add space, it will partion the drives to give you the additional space, but this only really works if you have it connected to your computer directly.I have close to 6 tb of available space on my drobo, and only about 2 being used. My mac thinks the drobo is full and won't copy to it. Any way to get my iMac or airport extreme to recognize there is actually more space, or partitions?
I have plugged in an external hard drive into my time capsule via the usb input. I have a main router for my network and internet and time capsule is connected to this wirelessly. The external drive doesn't show up as being attached to the time capsule and hence I cannot access any files. What do I need to do to be able to access it?
does an airport extreme with an attached external hard drive function exactly the same as a time capsule? i would like to know if there are any minute differences because i am in the market for one.
I have a hard drive which is attached to my iMac 24*7. I plan to move all my movies & pictures over to it. Would the Time Machine backup (through a different hard drive) backup my Hard drive?
Info: iMac (21.5-inch Late 2009), Mac OS X (10.7.3)