Problem: I need to boot from an external USB optical drive with another OS's cd (linux, windows, etc) I am trying to install some other operating systems ontop of my mac, but sadly my optical drive is broken and cannot read any large DVD's, but it can read small CD's, just not blank ones. So I bought a mac compatible USB external cd/dvd drive but when I restart and hold alt, my computer does not recognize it. Extra Info: If I want to boot from OS X Snow Leopard on the external drive, it will work, but for no other cd. Including a burned version of Linux or a commercial release version of linux.
Computer Info: It is a MacBook Pro first generation, and I just reformatted and started fresh with Snow Leopard. I used the external optical drive and was hoping to have 4 OS's on it, I know how to do it, but I just cant get the install cd/dvd's to be recognized.
This is bad and old, and full of lessons about backing up. Anyway, internal boot drive crashed a week ago, and internal optical drive is busted. New external LaCie dvd burner works fine, but all attempts to start up from Tiger, Leopard and Diskwarrior installation disks just end up back in OS10.3 on my external LaCie FW drive. I've tried many things: unplugged everything; switched external LaCie to USB (wouldn't boot), unplugged power from internal optical drive so Mac wouldn't look there first (somebody suggested that). Attempts to start up installers from mounted DVDs result in installer screen with restart button, which, when clicked on, results in... you guessed it... boot back to dreaded 10.3 system. Night owls and westcoasters, I am up for hours yet, pulling hair.
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?
I have a mac g4 mdd 1.25 and the power supply is fried..I also have a mac g4 mdd dual 867...that works..Question...can i take the main drive from the broken mac, put it in a box ..then reboot from that external drive on my mac that works.?
The loaner computer I am using is running Tiger. My clone of my computer thats in service is Leopard, every time I hold option and try to boot from the external clone it tells me this computer needs to be restarted.... can I just not boot from an external drive?
I have a 21.5" iMac, I installed Snow Leopard on a external drive, but I am unable to boot from it.. I've tried pressing the option(alt) key, and the only drive that shows up is the Macintosh HD..
Back on 10.5.5 and below, I was able to install Windows with Boot Camp and my External DVD Drive - My Internal SuperDrive is in the jelly and won't work. But on 10.5.6, Windows decided to give me licensing problems after I tried to use it with VMWare Fusion 2.0. So, in temper I deleted the partition in Boot Camp Assistant.
On the creation of a new, bigger partition for Windows 7 Public Beta, I found that I could no longer use my External DVD Drive to install Windows in Boot Camp.
So, now, Apple has pretty much forced me to come and get the SuperDrive fixed ($65 for a QUOTE, and Over $150 to get the thing fixed) if I want to install Windows onto my Mac.
Sorry if I am in the wrong forum, as you can guess im a newbie at the forum - not at computers though (6 years experience.. )
So I have a 1TB WD Hard drive USB and I copied the Leopard Disk image and restored it onto it in a 500GB partition.
I have tried to boot it up normally by holding down Alt on start up but the drive doesn't come up. Ok.
I have tried going into the Start up Disk, it comes up and when I click on it and click restart it doesn't restart, it just does that Mac Beep thing.
I have recently just tried to boot it up manually using the Open Firmware technique. It doesn't work.
I have a PPC Mac and I know that they can't normally boot up USB Drives but the other users which I read on the thread how to boot up by the Firmware technique said they're PPC and it worked.
I just wanted to format my computer, My leopard disk is gone now but I got it copied JUST IN TIME to my Hard drive.
I formatted my computer and now i'm stuck on Tiger.
I want to make a bootable clone of my iMac (PowerPC G5 running OS 10.5.8) and also backup my MacBook Pro onto an external USB hard drive so that I can restore from the external hard drive if my iMac dies (which is beginning to have startup problems).
I was planning to create 3 partitions - one for iMac's data which I'll continue to backup using TimeMachine, one for my MacBook Pro's data and one partition as a bootable clone of my iMac.
My question is.... if my iMac dies, how do I use the external hard drive to boot up from? Do I need Carbon Copy Cloner or will I be able to boot up from the external hard drive and access Apple's Disk Utility?
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 am trying to create an external boot drive but I can not boot to an external drive.If I mount an install disk to any drive I have it will not boot to it. If I select it in startup drive or option boot it will not work.
I have a requirement to encrypt the whole of my boot drive and my mobile Time Machine backup drive that I shall be taking with me on travels. I know I can use FileVault, which will give me an encrypted disk image but I don't like the reliability of sparse images and need the whole of the boot drive to be encrypted. I have tried Truecrypt to encrypt the TM disk, but could not get Time Machine to see it. I've been looking at the Checkpoint Full Disk Encryption product. What I'm trying to find out is if I can encrypt a USB HD with it, but seem to be going round in loops between Checkpoint and resellers.
I have a powerbook 12' 867 mghz, I know I would rather have a new one, but not ready to give up on this old gal yet! Anywhoo I thought the logic board was fried but after letting the powerbook "rest" I came back months later and sometimes it will boot but as soon as I try to do anything it freezes, so maybe the harddrive is fried? How do you get it to ignore the internal drive so it will boot from an external?
My iBook hard drive suddenly refused to boot up in Fall of '07. There was (and, to some extent, still is) some data I hadn't had the chance to back up, so rather than wiping it clean and/or getting a new one from apple, I just put it in a crate and set it aside until I had time to deal with it.
Flash forward to last week, when I used target mode to rescue about a quarter of the unsaved data. Out of every 15 or 20 times I throw it into target mode, my Macbook Pro recognizes it maybe once or twice, and then freezes up about 5 minutes in.
I've used the install disk to attempt repairing the drive, but even when I get a "successful repair", boot-up still never goes past the grey apple screen (sans wheel), even though disk utility recognizes it as "bootable" and lets me view all of the contents.
My question, then, is - is it possible to install OSX on an external drive and boot from that? If so, how do I do it without first creating a disk image of the drive (disk utility won't allow me to save it to the external)?
My imac G5 isight's hard drive is dead. I would like to install OS X on an external hard drive and just use that as the hard drive for this machine. My questions are:
Can I boot from an external hard drive via USB and just run everything off the external hard drive? If so, how should I format the external hard drive so that it can be selected and written to when I boot from the install cd? The external hard drive I would like to use is a 75 gig Acom. I've tried booting from the install cd, and it either won't even find the external hard drive, or, when it does, it says it can't write to that external hard drive.
I am unable to boot lion from an external drive on both a MacBook Pro mid-2009 and an iMac late 2008. Both have lion installed and I would like to boot from either a FW drive or USB key. I have reformatted both a FW drive and USB and set them to GUID and installed lion but I can only boot them to the Disk Utility App (drive shows up only as 'EFI Boot' when I hold option down).
The firmware is up to date and I also reset the PRAM. I am able to boot both computers from an external USB Snow Leopard drive.
I have just installed a 240GB LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbold SSD as a boot drive for my 2011 iMac (which contains only the 7,200 prm HDD). This has improved read/write speeds dramatically. I have transferred all my data and applications to the external drive in order to see the full benefit of the SSD.
However, I had not considered Time Machine. I thought it would simply be a matter of identifying the external drive and then connecting to the Time Capsule. However, the external drive is not visible in Time Machine set up and I suspect there could be a good reason: that it is not possible.
Have late 2006 iMac 24'' and I can't boot from external FireWire drive. If I connect the same external drive via usb2 I can boot from it but it is slower than FireWire800 would be. The external drive is in i-tec 3.5 External Case.
Info: iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3), iMac 24'' late 2006 intel DualCore2
Prior to upgrading to Lion I used SuperDuper to create a copy of the existing internal hard drive on an new external drive (iOmega eGo 500GB). Tested booting from the external disk and it appeared to work correctly. Upgraded to Lion. Several days later attempted to boot from the external disk (by setting the start up disk in the system preferences) but it fails. The system always boots into Lion.
What I've tried: Setting the start up disk through system preferences. Holding down the option key to select a disk on startup - interestingly enough I only see the internal hard disk and a recover HD. No sign of my external disk. Using a clean partition on the external hard drive I installed SL from the retail DVD. This produces the same effect of system booting to Lion on the internal drive, which suggests that the problem is not related to the copy I made using SuperDuper, but rather has to do with the external drive or something in Lion that prevents using an external drive (but I've never heard of such a thing).
I have an Intel iMac with with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 on separate partitions. Recently I have acquired an external USB hard drive. I formatted it with Ext4, and installed Linux Mint to it.
The installation went smoothly, but I can't seem to boot from the USB drive anymore. Holding down Option on start-up only gives me two choices: Mac OS X and Windows. The drive isn't recognized in either operating systems anymore: on Snow Leopard I get "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" and on Windows, it doesn't even show up in My Computer.
I have owned a Mac Mini for three years now (my friends convinced me to try the Apple way and this is my first Mac). The CD/DVD died just three weeks after warranty expired and Apple said (in essence) 'tough crap...you didn't buy AppleCare'.I have functioned without a CD/DVD drive since then, and everything was fine... until a week or two ago. We installed an update in iTunes, and everything started running S...L...O...W... So, we rebooted the computer! Instead of rebooting, it made the "bong!" sound and then a screen with an apple and a spinning wheel runs indefinitely. We let it run all night the first time and it stays on that screen for as long as you let it.
Is there any way I could install Windows 7/Vista/XP on my MacBook using Bootcamp, but install the Windows OS on an external hard drive instead of my internal drive? I hope this is making sense.
I want to know, is there any specific way possible I can set up my external hard drive so that when I plug it in, it mounts as an image file? So say I have a file "Image.DMG" on my desktop, I want to make it so that my external hard drive "becomes" Image.DMG, so when I plug it in, that's what it mounts as. I would like to do this because I want to make a boot image using my external hard drive.
I started this situation with a bootable hard drive that I removed from a 4,1 (mid 2008) and a brand new unibody MacBook Pro. What I wanted to do was use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old drive to the new MBP. I used CCC to clone the drive to the new one and repaired permissions on the internal drive and tried booting from it. No Luck. I figured this was stupid to do and I could just use migration assistant so I decided to reinstall Leopard on the unibody. Unfortunately when I attempt to boot from the DVD it doesn't go past a blank grey screen. I also tried holding down option to open the boot manager and select the DVD, when hit enter over the DVD it freezes. The interesting thing is that when I connect the old drive to the unibody using an enclosure I can boot from the external drive no problem. I tried using another computer to install leopard on the unibody over firewire and the installation went fine but when I start the unibody it doesn't go past a blank grey screen. I am also positive the hard drive isn't damaged or anything because when I go to the boot manager after leopard is installed the internal drive shows up but when I select it, it freezes. I have tried resetting the PRAM, NVRAM, repairing the disk (which is successful). When I try to boot into single user mode the computer freezes when loading the text. Another interesting thing is that when do boot from the external drive it goes through verbose mode every time and I never choose to do that. Right now I am attempting to clone drive using Super Duper to new drive and see what happens.
im in the market for a macbook and when i get iot i want to put windows on an external hard drive and use that to dual boot. is this possible? i am new to macs so i know nothing about it.
