Booting from an External USB 2.0 Drive

Can someone please point me to an explanation on how to set-up a bootable drive using an external USB 2.0 drive and a MacBook?
Thanks

Well, as long as you have the drive you just need the software.
There are a few different ones that will do it. I use SuperSuper, but there is also Carbon Copy Cloner, and LaCie's SilverKeeper both of which are free.
Once you have the software, it is just a matter of running the cloning tool and then testing the clone to verify that it does indeed boot your Mac.

Similar Messages

BOOT FROM AN EXTERNAL USB DRIVE???

I know apple has made it clear about booting from an external USB drive
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106474
but I know that there are people who are able to boot from an external drive, does anybody know how to do this?
It's just that id like to work on final cut studio on an external drive for various reasons:
1st: my powerbook's HD is small and slow (60gb)
2nd: my external usb drive is big (160 gb) and fast (7200 RMPS!)
so a little help would be apreciated
best regards

"Actually, USB II is faster than FW 400."
In theory, probably. In real life Firewire 400 is much faster than USB2, not to speak of Firewire 800:
"Wee Wiebetech" Portable FireWire/USB2 Drive Challenges The Fastest Competitors.

How can i install snow leopard on my mac G5 using a command line and booting from an external usb rom, since my disk i have is not a bootable media

How can i install snow leopard on my mac G5 using a command line and booting from an external usb rom, since my disk i have is not a bootable media

Hi.
You simply can't. Snow Leopard is compiled in Intel binary only.
Good Luck.

HT4889 Migration Assistant to update my new Mountain Lion iMac from an external USB hard disk drive, it is constantly saying that it is "looking for other computers". It doesn't find the external drive. Why is it looking for other computers?

I'm trying to use Migration Assistant to update my new Mountain Lion iMac from an external USB hard disk drive. I told it to look for a drive, yet it is constantly saying that it is "looking for other computers". It doesn't find the external drive ... it just endlessly looks for other computers. Why is it looking for other computers at all, when I told it not to?

Wow, the wording in Migration Assistant is misleading. I've never used it before, so I thought I would try to copy my files from the external drive ... my old iMac died, but I managed to get everything I need off it, using the 'cp' command in single-user mode. So I guess I'll just have to manually copy the files from the external drive to the new machine. I was hoping that Migration Assistant might help somehow, but obviously not.
Thanks for the quick reply!

IMac G5 won't boot from an external Seagate Freeagent FireWire drive

Hi guys,
So, the internal drive on my sister's iMac G5 finally died a few days ago. On my advice, she stopped in to Best Buy and bought a Seagate Freeagent Xtreme 1tb external drive (with FireWire). I had her connect the Seagate to her MacBook (in Windows Boot Camp mode) and use the Seagate Manager to disable the drive's power-saving mode. I then talked her through using her OS X Leopard DVD to (re)partition the Seagate (using the Apple Partition Map scheme) and format it as Mac OS Extended Journaled, and Leopard installed just fine on the external drive (from the G5, via USB).
However, now when she tried to boot from the external over FireWire (by holding down "Option" on power-on), it plays dead (no lights), and doesn't show as a viable boot device. When plugged into the laptop (also over firewire) it shows up just fine on the desktop. We would use USB to boot, but her G5 doesn't support booting over USB.
What am I missing here? We've been working on this for three days, and have gotten so freakin' close to having her iMac up and running again, but the cursed Seagate drive simply refuses to "kick in" at bootup and work on the G5!
Any ideas would be awesome,
Huxley

Honestly, that's exactly what I would do if I had hands-on access to the iMac, but such a swap is a bit beyond my sister's skill-set.
We never did figure out what the issue was, so I had my sister return the drive and order one from MacSales.com (aka Other World Computing) - if anyone will have a Mac-friendly drive, it's those folks!
Huxley

Installing Solaris 10 11/06 from an external USB CD-ROM drive

Hello. I recently purchased a new SunFire V245 SPARC server and would like to re-install Solairs 10 on it. However, the internal DVD-ROM is on back order from the vendor and will not arrive for a few days. I have an exteranl USB CD-ROM drive and the server sees it and the media when I access it from the Java desktop. However, I cannot boot from this device or see it in OpenBoot using any of the probe command. I've searched several forums and have seen that Solaris 10 can be installed from an external USB device on the x86/x64 platform. But I cannot find any information or steps on how to implement this procedure on the SPARC platform. Is this functionality possible? Or do I have to update my OpenBoot version? Please advise if possible. Thanks.

Hello Alex,
no, you can't use USB devices on SPARC as boot device.
The OBP (even updated ones) contains only support for the USB keyboard, but none for USB mass storage (which requires a device driver). The integrated USB ports are for slow devices like keyboard and mouse.
Using an external SCSI DVD-ROM works. Another choice is an installation via network.
Michael

No application runs after booting from an external (USB) drive

Hi all,
my best hope is that I just embarrass myself with a blatantly obvious question instead of finding a real issue that will be resolved only in later updates. Here it is:
As I want to upgrade my hard drive in my good ol' MacBook, I wanted to backup my present boot HDD to an external USB drive (freshly formatted, HFS+ journaled, GUID partition table). I tried both SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. In both cases, the backup/cloning process goes fine, and I can reboot into the external drive, and the OS starts (yes, with wifi working, even iStat menus, textExpander etc. initiating fine). But all applications (not those on the menu bar, though) crash and notify me of some thread having tried some invalid operation, or sometimes I even got some vague reference to kernel protection.
Do you have any ideas what this is? Something new and (supposedly) secure in 10.5.6? I tried a fairly standard procedure, I think. (Also, it is a fairly pressing issue as I would not really want to waste much more time on this drive swap. And I would rather use disk-cloning than the install disk and sucking back data from an apparently unreliable backup.)
Many thanks for any thoughts!
(Just to inform the interested, I ran a fairly extensive cleaning-maintenance-rebuild cycle by the latest Onyx before starting all this, this should clean up the state of the OS pretty much. But I could not run DiskWarrior. Convince me if you think that this would solve the problem.)

Thanks Devin, I think my issue is a bit different.
I am 'long' past the 10.5.6 update (as long as possible), it did not crash, and Software Update checked what it wanted several times since then (as it is set to do so daily).
Thanks for the safe boot tip, I have not tried it yet, though I am skeptical why would this help applications starting up without breaking some kernel protection -- but only if I booted up from an external drive.
I repaired all I could before the cloning of the drive, only the deep maintenance of DiskWarrior was skipped. With the disk or the OS itself, I basically did what you can, even the stuff that you are rarely supposed to do. (Onyx is a great tool to do all these and more, freely.)
I am not sure either that a FireWire drive would have helped, but who knows. (But really, the OS would boot, just the applications would feel that their are on an 'inferior' drive?) In any case, FireWire drives are not that easy to come by, and a risky investment -- e.g. I could not use them with the new MacBooks. Oh, and all my work was done on a firm table, but again, the behavior would be hard to explain as the HDD misbehaving, as the OS had no glitch, just I could not start applications without their crashing immediately.
Thanks again, I hope I run into something useful or if it is a bug then Apple magically pushes out some update before their winter break, or I will sadly watch my precious new drive sitting on a table idly.

Can you boot from an external USB hard drive? (Neo2 Platinum)

As I'm tempted to get a 160Gb drive for Linux and AMD64 XP installations. But obviously it needs to beable to boot from it.
Thanks

I read a post recently about booting from a usb memory stick - I assume the principal is the same. You need to make the usb drive bootable, in the same way that you would make a cd or a diskette bootable. In the example given about a usb memory stick, they suggested copying the contents of a win98 startup disk onto the memory stick. Then, run 'sys.com' on the drive letter of the usb stick from the startup disk. Then, enable usb legacy support in the bios, and access the boot order to tell it to boot from the usb or legacy, I'm not sure which.
What you're in essence wanting to do is to copy the xpcd to the usb drive, so the format and files, etc., are the same. Then, follow with the usb legacy stuff, etc....

T430s: boot from an external USB DVD drive

I wanted to change boot sequence to boot from external DVD drive to install Win8. To access the BIOS I hit Enter (empty password I guess) but in the BIOS everything is greyed out: I can't make any changes. What is going on?
Solved!
Go to Solution.

@kaja69...
As Rich has stated, you have a supervisor password set, and as Jin Li has stated, there is no default password.
For information on the various BIOS-level passwords, please see your T430s Hardware Maintenance Manual (manual pages 36-38).
Per the Community Rules, discussion of passwords is sensitive territory and may risk a thread lock, so please keep that in mind if/as this discussion progresses.
Regards.
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Can't boot from my External USB since 10.5.6 Update

Hi to everyone and sorry in advance for my english.
Here's my problem:
I have a copy of Mac OS X in my external USB drive, just for emergency. Two days ago I decided to update the OS, so i reboot my iMac and everythings gone in the right way. So the disk had no problems.
I run Software update and I downloaded a 377 MB Update (from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6). The installation was successful and the iMac reboot. After first reboot I had a second reboot and now it happend. My screen is still grey with the apple logo and the black wheel that keep rollin'. The hard disk seems to be freezed.
Someone knows if there's something i can do?? I don't wanna reinstall Mac OS.
Thanks. Andrea.

Restart, holding down the OPTION key until the icons start showing up on the screen. When the spinning gear stops, select the internal HD, and click arrow underneath. That should boot the machine with the internal HD. From there you can run Disk Utility on the USB HD. By the way, your English is fine.

Can a 10.6.8 drive boot from an external usb enclosure on a 2013 mac mini running natively on 10.8.3?

I primarily use a 2011 MBP running 10.6.8 as my primary work computer. My wife also has a MBP that runs on 10.7.X. I'm able to take the drive out of my MBP, put it in an external enclosure and boot it from my wife's MBP. However, on the Mac Mini I just bought yesterday (10.8.3), it does not boot. It just hangs on the white/grey Apple logo screen.
Is 10.6.8 no longer compatible to boot on a machine that is 2 years newer? Does anyone have any experience with this issue? Thanks in advance.

So in order to make this work, I'd have to:
1. upgrade my 2011 MPB to Mountain Lion? Is that even possible? It looks like Apple is doing a free OS X upgrade to Mavericks and 10.6.8 is included: http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/
However, this worries me a bit because of software compatibility. Not sure what it's going to do to all my software.
2. Buy an older pre-mountain lion Mac Mini.
3. Virtual machine. I'm not a fan of using Virtual machines. It eats up too much RAM.

Will the late 2013 Mac Pro boot from an external drive (4Tb, USB 3) with a cloned Win7 x64 partition on it?

Hello all,
I ordered a CTO Mac Pro for heavy rendering and animating work, and I am planning on using bootcamp to install a windows partition (for 3DsMax). As I am now using a HP Elitebook 8770W that has several valuable files and projects on it, I have bought a Seagate 4Tb external Desktop Drive that uses USB 3.0 to use as a backup drive. Now, as I saw that Bootcamp Assistant only supports installing a x64 version of Windows 8, my question is:
Will a late 2013 Mac Pro using bootcamp assistant boot from an external USB drive with a cloned partition running x64 win7? Or do I really have to buy Windows 8 and install that to my internal SSD, and then use the migration assistant to copy over my projects?
Thanks!

Posted? or found in new builds?
BCA should really just pull whatever the latest drivers are when run.
If it is with how it partitions and sets up nMP and its partition for Windows that is another matter and makes sense.
Some people want UEFI native booting in Windows, and my experieince with that on PCs has been that it boots faster and runs well, but has different partitions that it wants. For one thing, there is now a backup "system reserved" partition, just as Apple GUID has some volume information blocks and backup and areas that were once optional (and if format erase was not able to, it would not create one) are now mandatory.
Windows 8.1 is req'd, reason a backup should be a big must - is it might overwrite and use another OS's partition table entries. Especially when doing UEFI install.
There was something about which linux OS was safe and how they would each add entries in the table, but one would not place nice. That one had to be done first or not at all.

Booting up from an external USB drive

Can I boot up from an external USB hard drive with OS X installed? The Imac G5 manual says you can boot from an external Firewire HD but says nothing about booting from an external USB HD

Yes, because OS X cannot be started from a USB drive.
To make a clone of your hard drive you must use the proper software, you cannot simply use drag and drop. You can use Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, LaCie SilverKeeper, Retrospect, Synchronize! Pro X, Tri-Backup, or any of a number of such utilities. You can also use the Restore option of Disk Utility. This latter option only does full backups (no syncs or incremental backups) but it's free, part of the OS, and reliable. Follow these instructions:
1. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder unless it's already open.
2. Select the startup volume from the left side list.
3. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
4. Drag the startup volume to the Source entry field.
5. Select the backup volume from the leftside list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
6. Check the box to Erase Destination. Skip this step if you've already formatted the drive or if you cannot format it.
7. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.

How do install Tiger from an external USB drive?

I'm trying to upgrade from 10.2.8 to Tiger. How do I install Tiger from my external USB DVD drive? Tiger only comes on DVD and my G4 only has a CD ROM as an internal drive. Is there a way to boot from an external USB DVD drive?

bamim2,
you obviously just cracked some known hardware restrictions that not even Apple knew how to do: Don't start up from an external USB device.
The procedure you described is the standard procedure for the startup manager. However, as Apple's article explains this does NOT work with USB-devices on PowerPC (G3, G4, G5) based Macs.

Arch: Install to & run from External USB Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

I wanted to play with ArchLinux 2009.02, but replacing the existing Debian-Lenny on the laptop's HDD wasn't an option. So I experimented with installing Arch on an external USB Hard Disk Drive.
I have tried to make this "newbie-friendly", so I hope the more experienced will forgive the detail.
Materials:
Three year old Dell Inspiron 6000
CPU = 2.0 GHz Pentium
RAM = 2.0 GB
Internal HDD = 80 GB
Internal CD/DVD R/RW
External USB HDD = Freecom FHD-2 Pro 80 GB
Archlinux 2009.02 install CD
Steps to install:
1. I put the Archlinux install CD in the drive and connected the external 80 GB HDD in the USB port.
2. When the Dell laptop was booted, I pressed F2 to enter the BIOS setup. I edited the boot sequence to the following:
Internal CD/DVD
External USB device
Internal HDD
On the Dell, you can also press F12 to select the preferred boot device for that boot.
3. I started the laptop and the Archlinux installation menu came up and I proceeded with installation following the "Official Arch Linux Install Guide" and the "Beginners Guide".
4. Used km to change to UK keyboard layout and then began the installer script (/arch/setup). I was installing from the core CD so I skipped the network steps.
5. HDD preparation.
This was fairly straightforward with two cautions:
(a) Make very sure that the external HDD (sdb) is selected for the operations.
(b) Remember to set the Bootable Flag for the first (/) partition on the HDD.
I chose 20 GB for /, 2 GB for swap and the remainder for /home.
6. The package selection and installation was fairly straightforward.
7. Configuration of System
This was section was straightforward with one warning:
USB had to be added to the HOOKS in the /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file!
I found this to be essential for my external USB HDD to function as a bootable device. Otherwise I got the same sorts of errors relating to unrecognisable file system types that other people have reported in the forum.
The relevant line from the end of the edited /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file is below:
HOOKS="base udev autodetect pata scsi sata usb filesystems"
8. Installation of GRUB was the other point where caution and/or correction was necessary.
When it asked where GRUB should be installed, I had to select sdb (my external USB HDD) and not any of the particular partitions on sdb. If the root partition sdb1 was selected then the laptop won't boot from the external USB HDD.
The GRUB /boot/grub/menu.lst as written by the installation routine specifies hd(1,0) which doesn't work when you try to reboot from the external USB HDD. When you boot Arch from the external USB HDD, as far as Arch is concerned - at that point in time - the external USB HDD is the first drive in the system. To fix this:
(a) When the Arch boot menu comes up, press e to edit the grub entries.
(b) Change the first line to hd(0,0)
(c) To the end of the kernel line add rootdelay=8
(d) Press b to boot the system with these temporary corrections.
(e) Once your Arch system has booted, edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst to make the above changes permanent.
The relevant portion of my /boot/grub/menu.lst looks like the following:
# (0) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/... ro rootdelay=8
initrd /boot/kernel26.img
# (1) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux Fallback
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/... ro rootdelay=8
initrd /boot/kernel26-fallback.img
9. The laptop happily and consistently boots Arch Linux from the external USB HDD when it's plugged in before startup/booting.
Running Arch from the external USB HDD seems as quick as running Debian from the internal HDD.
So if there is a performance penalty associated with using an external USB HDD, my wife and I haven't noticed.
In summary, the three essential points to address during installation to an external USB HDD are:
Remember to set the bootable flag for the first partition.
Add USB to the HOOKS for /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file.
Correct the /etc/grub/menu.lst file.
I hope this is helpful.
Ted

Hi Rookie,
As you say, it is worth remembering the rootfstype= option for the kernel line just in case someone still has problems with GRUB after making all the other changes.
I was working with the most recent Arch 2009.2 release.
I only got messages about unrecognisable file system type when I tried booting with the "stock" or "as-installed" GRUB (before I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst). After editing /boot/grub/menu.lst to identify the drive correctly and add rootdelay, GRUB was able to do the rest and everything worked OK without any error messages.
Best wishes,
Ted

Booting from an External USB 2.0 Drive

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