Software :: Dangers Of Booting From External Drive?
Aug 17, 2010
Specifically, I'm considering a freelance design gig for which the client supplies an external firewire drive with a) a bootable system, b) a more recent version of the Adobe Suite than I own (necessary - his files are all in the more recent version), c) all of the project files, and d) Suitcase and all of the tons of different fonts required. The gig is uninspiring - a coupon catalog - but each of his many clients gets to supply either their own print-ready PDF or copy/photos/fonts for him/me to layout...the result being there's a ton of fonts.
So in other words, it's a preconfigured system to simplify different people working on the same files. Not at the same time, obviously, but the idea being that a new person can simply boot up from this drive and go right to work. I've scanned the drive with VirusBarrier and found nothing wrong with it. And I don't see any suspicious programs in the Applications folder. And I don't have any reason to suspect that that this guy would do anything underhanded...but I'm understandably (I think) nervous. Is there a way to protect my internal drive/files when I boot from an external drive? It would give me peace of mind if there were steps I could take that would allow me to boot from his drive without worrying about the possibility that there MIGHT be a program or script or something that might muck about with my computer.
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Feb 21, 2009
My step dad is showing some interest in my Mac and wants to give it a go. I was thinking of installing OS X on an external drive and booting directly into it from his PC. Is that possible?
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Jun 26, 2009
I have a mac pro running Leopard with Time Machine backup on an external 500GB FREECOM drive. My issue is that I cannot boot my mac while the drive is connect, because it seems it tries to boot from the external drive and it starts displaying a flashing folder with a question mark in it. So everytime I need to fire up my machine, I need to disconnect the external drive > boot > connect the external drive.
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Jul 12, 2009
My MacBook's hard drive recently took a turn for the worst. I can't boot up from my external with the drive still installed. If I take my internal hard drive out can I then boot up my mac from my external?
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May 7, 2009
Is it possible to boot from a external hard drive instead of my internal drive?
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Sep 27, 2009
I have a Black Macbook with 2GB ram, 250GB HDD, 2.4GHz Processor and have been trying to boot off of my 320GB firewire External HDD but it has so far been unsuccessful. I have the external formatted as GUID Partition Table, and have the four system disk folders on the drive (Applications, Library, System, Users) which I copied from a time machine backup. I have tried booting the MB while holding down the option key and the external HDD appears as a drive available for booting on. But when I select the external HDD a cross with a circle around it appears and it boots off the internal HDD instead of the external HDD.
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Mar 10, 2010
I'm planning on getting a SSD to put in my Mac Mini within the next month or two, but there are a few questions I have about it. I'll still have the 160 GB HDD that's in the Mini currently, and I'll buy an enclosure for it. But what I want to do, as to save space on the SSD (since I'll be buying 80 GB probably) is boot Windows 7 off the 160 GB. Is this possible?
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May 15, 2009
Environment clones ( made by Leopard compatible SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner) to two separate LaCie Firewire drives will not boot from those drives Leopard (10.5.6) running on an old 14" iBook G4 1.1 GHZ. Both SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner declared the clones bootable, and they are selectable as Startup drives. All three drives (internal included) are partitioned using Apple Partition Map and OSX Extended Journaled. Has anyone met and solved this problem? BTW - I did read somewhere that Leopard is designed to use the GUID partition scheme; but this is of no use with a PPC Mac. Could this be the source of the problem?
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Sep 20, 2009
My parents bought a new iMac and have finally made the switch. There's one program on their old hard drive that they need to use. I've installed Windows XP on the new iMac, put the old pc hard disk in a USB2 enclosure and would love to use that to boot off of. The problem is that the iMac doesn't consider that as an option when booting.
The other issue is that if the power goes off and the computer reboots, the default seems to be for the Windows partition and the Mac OSX.
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Jul 29, 2010
This week I discovered that the hard drive on my white Core 2 Duo macbook is failing. It's of course out of warranty. I have superduper and am in the process of getting things ready to swap out the drive for a new one. Before going ahead with the new install, however, I wanted to test out the bootability of my superduper backup. I held option while restarting and chose to boot from the backup icon. The OSX tiger splash screen appeared and slowly booted up but then a login window appears asking for a name and a password. I assumed it was asking for my administrator name and password.
Therefore I entered that information. However, after entering the information and clicking on the login button the window shook back and forth and shook off my password as if to say "No. No!" I tried entering the admin information again and again. I tried the short name. I tried to reset my user information. Nothing worked. So, I tried to redo my backup thinking that there might be some issues on that side of things. But now my backup isn't complete. It's lagging at about 14 gigs shy of the full copy. I want to get this machine back to working order but am running stuck.
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Mar 9, 2009
I just set up an old G4 Mac Mini with a 1.5 GHz PPC chip and 64 MB VRAM as an HTPC with the intent to use it to watch Hulu and ABC.com and other sites where you can stream TV shows online. However, Hulu is very very choppy. The audio's fine but the video is pretty disappointing. In full screen it's really just a series of still pictures. I know Flash on the mini is supposed to not be that great, but is there anything I can do?
Is there any way to change the video settings of the g4 or of the TV to improve the streaming video playback? I'm playing it on a 40" Samsung LCD connected via DVI--> HDMI.
I'm booting off an external firewire drive through Firewire 400 and my concern is that perhaps this is the problem - the slowdown is not coming from the processor or the VRAM but rather from the Firewire. Can anyone with a similar setup let me know if this works for them. Is there anyway to speed up the I/O between the G4 and the Firewire drive? it's a LaCie 250GB D2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface.
According to the Activity Monitor, Safari's using 72% of the CPU to play from Hulu. According to Hulu's support page, the Mac Mini meets the system requirements. I'm just trying to watch the SD videos, not the HD. I have Flash 10 and Safari 3.1.2.
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May 15, 2009
So here is my bright idea. I still may want to have Windows on my iMac for work projects *sigh* I think I came up with a solution, I rather not partition my iMac (when I buy it) 1TB drive for Windows. Don't want Windows on my main disk - I need the storage for Mac things, personal stuff etc. Is it possible to boot from a Firewire connected external HDD to run Windows?
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Nov 18, 2009
I have an external hard drive which I have successfully installed Windows XP SP3 onto. It was a long and painful process but I finally was able to get a modified XP install disc ready and from a Dell PC running Windows was able to install onto the external hard drive and I'm able to boot from it and everything. I did this on a PC because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to boot correctly from an external drive in Mac.
Anyway, the hardest part is in the past and now my only problem is how to boot this external hard drive from my macbook, which is primarily what I want to use it on. I currently have a Macbook with three operating systems on it: Mac OS 10.5.8, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows XP SP3. I use rEFIt to boot into these operating systems. I tried using rEFIt to boot into XP on the external hard drive but it just gives me the legacy error messages saying that it couldn't load and noting the booting legacy os is not well supported by mac.
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Mar 23, 2010
how to make a clone of my 10.5 current Drive (using superduper) and then booting from the external and upgrading (the external) to 10.6. the logic being that I could run 10.6 and my mac from my External Drive and then revert back to 10.5 when I boot as normal...
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Jan 11, 2009
Will the external display work while I boot from the Leopard DVD? My MacBook Pro screen is broken and I want to make an .img file of my HD before I install the new LCD.
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Apr 28, 2009
My Intel MacBook is in the shop, and I swapped out my hard drive before I sent it in and put it in a USB enclosure. I was able to boot my friend's MacBook Pro from the drive, but my G4 Mac Mini is not seeing it as an option (upon startup or otherwise). I can read files from it, but I really need to boot from the drive for some other things (cookies, passwords, and especially the ability to sync my iPod touch).
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Jul 2, 2010
I am trying to do a clean install of OSX 10.5 on my old powerbook G4 15". I am using a 10.5 image file on my external. I partitioned the external using GUID, and restored the image file onto the external. (this method works when installing on intel macs). Unfortunately, I cannot boot 10.5 using this method on my powerbook. Is it because i am using a firewire 800 cable? Should I be booting it using a firewire 400? I know that PPC macs cannot boot using usb, so i am stumped.
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Jun 19, 2012
I have a brand new 13" MBA which I'm working on building an image to use for deployment using Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.5. For whatever reason, I can't boot the new 2012 MBA from an external LaCie FW800 or Thunderbolt 1TB Little Big Disk that is running either 10.7.2 or 10.7.4. As soon as I select the drive to boot from when holding the Options key or from selecting the partition from Startup Disk in System Preferences, I get the do not enter icon(circle with the diagonal slash). I tried both plugged in through a Cinema Display and plugging the Thunderbolt drive directly to the laptop. I confirmed both LaCie drives boot properly on an iMac and the last gen MBP/MBA.
Laptop Specs:
13"
1.8GHz Dual-core i5
8GB
128 SSD
[Code]...
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Nov 20, 2010
I have a 2007 Intel 24" iMac (Last of the white plastic editions) and I've recently had troubles with the 7600GT Graphics card. The computer would get strange artifacts all over the screen, before crashing. Unfortunately, it is out of Applecare, so I took it into a shop and had the card replaced. Upon receiving it back, they told me that they replaced the graphics card, but still found problems with it booting up inconsistently. After some testing, they realised it was the Hard Drive controller at fault, and put my harddrive in an external USB enclosure and booted it off that instead. This was an easier solution than replacing the entire logic board, they told me. (and they gave me the enclosure for free).
Now I've brought it home, and set it all up, only to find that the HDD fans are constantly spinning at 5600 RPM, which is deafeningly loud, even so over my room fan. I presume this is because there is no longer any hard drive controller/hard drive in there. I've installed SMC Fan Control, but to my dismay you can only set the minimum fan speed, and not the max. If possible, i'd like to set the max fan speed at a much lower rate, without needing to open up the iMac. So my questions are:
Is there a way I can set the max fanspeed for the HDD, or disable it since there isn't one in there anyway? And is there a better solution for booting my iMac OS onto an external HDD? (i.e. Should I look into buying a firewire 800 drive enclosure instead of this USB 2.0 one?)
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Jul 24, 2010
At one point I had my external monitor set up to work with windows, so I know how, but since then I have reinstalled windows. I haven't used windows in a long time, so didn't bother setting it back up. Recently, my macbook's screen broke, I can boot into OS X fine by plugging in an external keyboard or mouse, or simply by closing the lid quickly before the primary display loads, thus booting it into clamshell mode using only an external display. I cannot however do this with windows, and since my screen is broken I cannot set the display properties as I cannot see them. Is there any way to either boot windows into clamshell mode or set the display properties using keyboard shortcuts?
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Apr 18, 2010
I'm running OS X 10.4.11 on a 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro and I want to make a copy of the entire internal HDD on a external (500 Gb) drive, so that I would be able to boot from the external hard-drive. I'm interested in doing it because I want to have a back-up for the internal HDD, in case it fails, I'll just plug-in the external HDD, boot from it and continue working using <b>only</b> the external HDD, which will be an image of the actual internal one. Please tell me if this is possible? If yes, how exactly do I create a bootable, full disk image of the entire internal HDD, how do I copy it on the external HDD and how do I boot from the external drive?
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Dec 11, 2008
I have Mac Pro tower quad cord. My 250G drive was full so i got a WD Caviar Black 500g drive. Then used image to copy to an external drive then I restored to the 500G drive then replaced the 250g drive with the 500G. When I boot up I get the folder with question mark.
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Feb 25, 2009
What I have done already is restore my USB Flash Drive with a .dmg of Leopard using Disk Utility. The next step consists of booting Tiger into Leopard by holding down the option key at start-up and selecting my flash drive. The USB flash drive comes up on my computer as a Leopard Install DVD but when I hold in the option key during start up, I do not have an option for my flash dirve to boot.
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Jan 17, 2010
i have a pc, with a firewire chip, can i boot my iMac G4 from a tiger iso extracted to the hard drive in the pc(with nothing else on it) using the alt/option key? If not, how can i install OS X without the DVD, without using another mac?
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Feb 17, 2010
So I have a 2.2GHz SR MBP, and the superdrive just went out on me. It will read and write to CDs, but won't recognize any DVDs that I insert into it. I bought a USB enclosure and DVD drive, and it works fine to read and write to DVDs when in Snow Leopard, but I am unable to boot from it (specifically so I can install Windows 7, but I can't boot SL either). I reboot and and hold down option, and only see Macintosh HD, not the disk I'm trying to boot off. I've cloned SL to my flash drive and I can boot off that fine, but unfortunately I'm unable to do that with Windows...
Any ideas? I've googled it and it seems like booting off a USB optical drive is supported, so I'm unsure why it's not working for me...
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Jun 13, 2010
I recently switched my hard drive to a new one where I installed OS X. For some reason when I swapped the new drive, it doesn't see the drive when booting, but I can still see it recognize when I boot off a map and an extended partition)
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Aug 5, 2010
So I recently purchased a 16 GB iamakey from Lacie. I saw in an article in MacLife how to install a stripped down version of OS X on it to use as a rescue tool. I partitioned the drive into a 2gb and 14gb sections. The 2gb i want to use as just a flash drive for toting files. I installed OS X on the 14 GB section. The installation completes, but when I try to boot in, I just get a gray screen. The mouse can be seen. What went wrong? I have done this twice following the instructions.
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Aug 13, 2010
I have a MacBook pro running Leopard (10.5.8). I am updating to a legitimate copy of Snow Leopard. I'm not installing from the discs, though. I made my flash drive a bootable disk, and I'm trying to install from the USB drive. I'm pretty confident that I did it correctly, but I am still having trouble. This is a brand new 8 gb flash drive. Using Disk Utility, I changed the drive to GUID Partition Table and formatted it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then I restored my Snow Leopard .dmg to the flash drive. Everything seems to be going smoothly at this point. I clicked on "Install Mac OS X" in the newly created bootable drive, and after going through the next few windows it started installing. The progress bar increased to about 7%, which took probably five minutes.
After this, it stated something along the lines of "installation will continue after reboot," and then rebooted itself. When OS X started back up, it was like nothing had happened. No changes, no continuing installation, it was like the installation hadn't begun at all. I tried a second time and the same thing happened: partial install, reboot, then nothing but regular startup. The USB Snow Leopard Install Drive does show up in the list of bootable drives in the "Startup Disk" portion of System Preferences. Even when I select it as the startup disk and restart, OS X just boots normally almost like it's ignoring my direction to boot from the Snow Leopard install drive. When I hold "alt" during startup to select the drive to boot from, only the regular Macintosh HD is presented as an option.
I don't understand why it would show up in System Preferences>Startup Disk, but not show up when pressing alt at startup. I noticed in Disk Utility that the "Owners Enabled" option was set to "No," so I used Terminal to change that to "Yes," even though I'm not sure it makes a difference at all. I named the USB Drive "Snow" and entered the line 'sudo /usr/sbin/vsdbutil -a /Volumes/Snow' in Terminal to do change owners enabled to yes. So this is where I am stuck. From what I can tell, I think I created the bootable usb drive properly, but I can't seem to boot from it and running the install off of the drive while already logged into OS X halts at about 7% and reboots.
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Dec 19, 2009
I have a MacBook Pro and last week I upgraded to Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and now when I close my laptop, my hard drive spools up every minute and it's very annoying. I can't leave some apps open because they have illegal operations due to the hard drive booting repeatedly. It's to the point now where every 60 or so seconds my external speakers come on, my hard drive spools up loudly. When I finally open my laptop the screen comes on for a few seconds, cuts off and goes black and then comes back on a few seconds later. When my laptop is open it works perfectly however.
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Nov 12, 2009
I have Snow Leopard installed on an 8GB Flash Drive. It works all good and fine. The only thing is I don't want to do an upgrade, I want to do a FRESH erase and install of my machine (macbook). I tried plugging in the USB drive and restarting the computer while holding down "c", this proved to not work.
Any way that I can erase the computer completely and fresh install from my USB drive?
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