External hard drive freezes on boot.

I just bought a USB 2.0, 320gb Iomega External Hard Drive. I formatted the drive as OS X Extended (Journaled). It mounts fine once I turn it on and I can access all my files with ease but there is a problem lying under the surface.
When I shutdown my mac with the HD plugged in and on it goes smoothly and I can hear the HD shut off. When I turn the Mac back on I hear the chime and then it sort of plays again a few times but it skips and the apple logo never shows up...just a gray screen. If I shut off the power to the external HD it unfreezes.
I zapped the PRAM and that didn't fix the problem... Is there any way to use this external HD without having to constantly turn it on and off?

First thing to try is an SMC reset, just in case the Mac's system controller is getting mixed up during the system self test.
To reset the SMC on an Intel mini:
-From the Apple menu, choose Shut Down (or if the computer is not responding, hold the power button until it turns off).
-Unplug all cables from the computer, including the power cord and any display cables.
-Wait at least 15 seconds.
-Plug the power cord back in, making sure the power button is not being pressed at the time.
-Then reconnect your keyboard and mouse to the computer.
-Press the power button on the back to start up your computer.
If that doesn't help, check the Iomega site for any updated firmware or drivers for the device.

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Why is external hard drive freezing on iTunes upload?

I have been having problems with uploading music from an external hard drive into iTunes for about a month and I do not know what to do. I recently purchased a HP Envy 15 running Windows 7 64bit home edition. I decided to scrub my iTunes library and start new with uploading selected CDs and purchases from both Apple and Amazon onto the external hard driv e (Western Digital 1TB). Putting the music on the external hard drive is not an issue as I see that all of my music files are there. However, when it comes to adding all my music folders into iTunes the problem starts. The upload will get to song 200-300 and both the hard drive and program will freeze. When I first purchased the laptop I tried the same thing and connecting my iPod classic to the laptop and had the same issue causing my whole computer to freeze following by the blue screen of death. Concerned, I sent my laptop to HP to fix thinking my USB drives were bad. I just received back a week ago and I am having a repeat issue minus the blue screen of death. Again, putting my CDs onto the external hard drive was not a problem at all, but when I want to add my Amazon MP3 files, other iTunes music and other folders my external hard drive freezes.
I have my external plugged into the USB 3.0 port while attempting the upload and not sure if this is the issue. I am also unsure if enough power is getting to the hard drive during upload as I have read about this being an issue for some users. Can anyone provide any assistance on this? I am trying to avoid putting all 5000-7000 songs on my main drive to get my music back on my iPod and find this super annoying. Any assistance would be great, thanks.

Nope, one of the selling points of the drive was that it came ready to work with both Mac and Windows (the product description says there is an NTFS drive installed for use on Mac). No hacking or installing on my part.
But I think I figured it out. Apparentely, Mavericks comes installed with something that does not allow it to write NTFS no matter what (well, unless you go through a whole bunch of technical stuff to rewrite the software). My old MacBook was Leopard.
I'll just reformat the external hard drive for Mac, and if I ever need to use it on a Windows, I'll install HFS+ Explorer on the Windows. Oh well.

Is it possible to install windows 7 on a partitioned external hard drive and then boot from windows from time to time?

I have some applications that are windows only. I want to install windows 7 on my external hard drive and boot to it when I need to use my windows applications. Is this possible with a mac and, if so, how can I do that? I have a 64-bit Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion.

VirtualBox is free.
Besides the websites for the different products, I don't know of any.
https://www.virtualbox.org
http://www.vmware.com
http://www.parallels.com

External Hard drive freezing machine after indexing

Hi guys,
So i think i figured out what my problem is,
it seems that when my western digital (my passport) hd is plugged in, it begins to index it (shud this happen each time) once it finishes finder becomes unresponsive and a reboot is required?
what could cause this and how could i fix it?
its a brand new hard drive WINDOWS BASED THO - running tuxera ntfs on lion?
any advice thanks

KTM450rider wrote:
Do I need to boot from the install DVD?
this is often the easiest and eliminates any "busy drive" problems. what's wrong with booting from the install DVD? takes a couple of minutes.
My main hard drive is OK... the drive that I am having problems with is an external hard drive that I was using to back up my lap top. I just want to get the external drive reformatted, but disk utility will not erase it. I get an error that disk utility shut down, "please check the drive and make sure that the drive is not in use or programs are still running"
Is their a way to do a hard or forced reformatting of an external hard drive, I don't care about the information on the drive
I also tried disk warrior to recover the info on the disk and all it does is crash my mac pro????
Thanks again for the help

New Firewire external hard drive freezes

I have an external USB hard drive, and it works fine if I test it by copying and pasting 10 .jpg files (total ~ 2Meg) to the external USB hard drive from the internal hard drive. I got a new external firewire hard drive and if I try the same test, it freezes mid-copy. (It just sits there forever and I actually have to power down to get it to un-freeze).
It's a brand new Acomdata 250GB firewire external hard drive.
What could be wrong?
Thanks!

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
I'd return the drive. Get a drive from
Otherworld Computing
Granite Digital (they make cases to go around internal drives)
LaCie
Cooldrives
These are the only ones I know to reliably work under Mac OS X 10.3 or higher.
See my FAQ:
http://www.macmaps.com/firewirebug2.html
Disclaimer: Reference to links I make to my Macmaps.com website are a for your information only type reference. I do not get any profit from this page, and it is open to the public.

My clone external hard drive won't boot - start up?

Hi,
I am selling my MacPro and need to clone its system drive for the new lap top I will buy soon. So I bought a new external 2TB HDD from OWC. I have found that this external HDD will not boot up, even though it says it is bootable, and appears in the Start Up prefs when I select it. It sppears on the desktop, doesn't make any weird clicking noises as well.
I am using 10.6.8 OS X. The 2TB HDD has two partitions (created with DU), one is bootable (Mac OS X extended journaled), and the other is a regular HDD space for media etc. It is GUID. It has "Ownership" checked in the info box.
I used CCC 3.4.4 and since this is 'hopefully' a one time deal, selected the 'Delete anything that doesn't exist on the source' setting. I cloned my system drive to the bootable space and had no problems with the transfer. Plenty of space to write all the files. I even made sure everything was checked in the 'source' window that a system drive might need. Everything was checked.
I spoke with a representive at the OWC Sales company and checked that this HDD can be used as a bootable drive.
I checked the connections: with external HDD with FW800, and Sata connectors. I have checked it with my Mac Book Pro as well. Same result. No boot.
I really don't understand why this drive won't boot, since everything looks correct.
Does anyone have any thoughts, suggestions, ideas for fixing this issue?
Thanks
M

Not sure if you managed to get this issue resolved yet Marcus, but I too have a similar problem:
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.
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 selectable 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).
Any help is greatly appreciated - I can't find any relevant answers elsewhere. Thanks,
Dan

Encrypting an external hard drive for dual boot use

I'm soon to be reformatting my entire hard drive and starting from scratch—for the first time since 2007. I have a 250GB external that used to be an internal drive (for backups—and it's simply an IDE drive in an enclosure), and when I switched it I never bothered to format it, so it's been in ext3 the whole time. With Windows there are ext drivers, and I've had a lot of success with one, so that's how I've been accessing the drive from XP. The annoying thing about this is that when I bring the external HD to a friend's house or something I've first had to install the ext driver.
I'm thinking about formatting the external HD in NTFS, but I would also like to encrypt the drive. I've only encrypted hard drives once before, on my laptop. What would be the best way of doing this/is it even possible to have the drive encrypted while still having access to it in both Windows XP and Linux?
Last edited by tonyisnt (2010-06-11 18:49:37)

I guess truecrypt would be the answer. Requires however that truecrypt has to be installed on the boxes that you wanna access your drive on.
It's imho the best way of fooling everybody....it's even customs-proof when using it with a hidden volume.

External Hard Drive Partitioned to boot both Intel and PowerPC -and backup

Have been remiss backing up drives, do it sporadically and have had a few close calls and am now trying to upgrade my skills.
I work with 3 computers - 2 intel MBP Core Duo (one Leopard, one Tiger, difference Ghz, screen size, generation) and PowerPC G4-running Tiger. I read recently you can partition a drive and format one as a bootable drive for an intel, the other for a powerPC.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006061610374449
I'll have to read the instructions a couple more times before I get it. But what do people think - have any of you done it? Problems?
I have a further question or questions: I saw an external drive for the Mac 1000GB at OWC!!! Yikes, there is also one for 1500 GB!!!
I wondered how many partitions I could make - can I create a bootable drive in three separate partitions, and use those as a backup drive for each? Money is an issue, I can't afford a drive for each computer, so this would be the most economical.
Could I create a 4th partition, just to move photos, music libraries without their being computer specific (e.g., check share library?)
Is there any advantage in creating a boot drive that just starts the computer, but keep the backup files separate, or is cloning the drive then doing incremental backups the best so it is both a boot drive and a backup?
This is beyond my skill set and I am still fuzzy about backup software and boot drives and how they all interconnect - so far I have just been saving desktops and font folders to my oh so slow USB EXTERNAL HD (200 MB) periodically, or specific key files. Is there anyone who can walk me through this?
Thanks
Annexit

Partition the drive using Disk Utility, I'd recommend one bootable clone partition per machine, one partition for archiving (data you want to keep but not on a machine), and optionally one partition for a Time Machine backup for the Leopard system. Use the Apple Partition Map (under options in the Partition tab). Note that you'll read that Intel machines require GUID partition scheme, but that's only for installing the OS from a DVD, not relevant for cloning. You'll want APM to boot the PPC machines. Bootable clones can be sized equal to the internal HDDs being backed up, or slightly smaller. Partitions should be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Personally, I have two external drives set up identically, with partitions for bootable clones of a PPC machine with 10.4 and two Intel machines running 10.5, plus an extra partition where I store movie projects. I use SuperDuper to update the bootable clones. I have two drives because I store one offsite (at work). Every few days I bring an updated backup drive to work and the other one home.

Can I use an external hard drive to install boot camp?

What the question said also it'll be Windows 8.1 because that's the only one you can download from the M-soft store now.

normyp wrote:
What the question said also it'll be Windows 8.1 because that's the only one you can download from the M-soft store now.
The answer is simple and has been stated many times before. Boot Camp will not allow you to install to an external drive. Until now, Windows made it nearly impossible to install on an external drive, although I hear that has changed with Windows 8.1 (but I do not have personal experience with that).
If you use a different EFI boot loader, you might have much better luck installing Windows on an external drive, but Boot Camp does not support that.

How to restore an external hard drive formatted with boot camp assistant?

Hi,
I was just about to set up boot camp using the assistant and it was makign the disk image on an external drive. I didn't realise I had two drives plugged in and selected the wrong one! I cancelled it as soon as I realised, but it had already reformatted the drive.
Any chance that a recover software will be able to get it back? what do you think?
thanks in advance

hey,
Actually I've just finished running DIsk Drill and have recovered almost everything (500GB worth). The only thing is every file is just numbered with no directory structure (ie. File0000001.jpg, File00000002.mov, etc etc)
so I've got the data, but also about 10000000 files to sort through!

Help with using external hard drive to boot windows on PC

Hi,
I'm not sure if this is in the right place, so apologies in advance if not. I've looked around the internet for a good while now, and I haven't found anyone in my exact position.
My PC's hard drive (running Windows 7) recently died; long story short, I am attempting to reinstall windows. The only other computer I have is this MacBook Pro, on which I have an .iso file of Windows 7. So I want to use my external hard drive (WD 500GB "MyBook") as a boot device so that I can install Windows onto my new internal hard drive.
The problem I am having is that, well, nothing seems to be working. Every time I try to load the .iso onto my external hard drive and boot my PC with it, either a blank screen appears or it says "missing operating system".
I have made sure that the BIOS is running the external hard drive as its boot priority.
I have tried using Disk Utility to partition the external drive, then using 'Restore' to load the .iso onto the partition, to no avail.
I have tried simply dropping the extracted .iso files onto the hard drive, this doesn't work.
I have also tried changing the file system of the external hard drive using the 'Erase' feature (NTFS-3G (using an addon), FAT32, exFAT, all of the others), but I notice that whenever I use Restore after doing this, the file system seems to return to Mac OS Extended, which might be why it isn't booting up on my PC. Is there any way I can succesfully partition the external hard drive in a format that will allow Windows 7 to boot (such as NTFS?), and is Disk Utility even the right program to do this?
If you want any more information from me, please let me know and I'll do my best to provide it - I'm not the most advanced mac user in the world, but I've spent days trying to fix this problem and nothing, no combination of anything, seems to work at all. So any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

Here is a quick suggestion for you:
Download Virtual Box (free PC Emulator for Mac) and install Windows 7 on your Mac (don't worry about activating it yet, as you don't need to keep it more than a few hours). You can tell Virtual Box to use the ISO file as the DVD drive for your virtual Windows computer, so no need to burn a disk.
Search Google for creating a bootable USB installer for Windows 7. I found a link that gave good instructions on how to do this using DiskPart.
Follow the instructions to make the bootable USB stick for installing Windows 7 using your virtual machine you created above.
Use the USB stick to install Windows on your new PC.
Remove the virtual Windows machine from your Mac.
Remove Virtual Box from your Mac.
I found a set of instructions and built an installable USB stick last night that worked great for installing Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) onto my older ThinkPad I had sitting at home. The USB installer also installs in about half the time as a DVD install. The only reason I have you create the virtual Windows PC is that all of the instructions for makeing the Windows install USB stick are written assuming that you already have access to a running Windows PC. By doing this install, you have up to 3 days before you would need to activate it and you can build the installer USB stick and remove teh virtual computer long before that.

Can I make an external Hard Drive my boot drive

My internal hard drive is about to die, it is making strange grunging noises and the computer is taking up to 30 minutes to boot up. The internal disk is the original 10GB disk with 9.7GB on it.
I constantly get boot disk nearly full warnings. So I bought a Western Digital My Book 2, Home Edition 500GB Firewire Drive. I connected it up and it appeared on my desktop. Being a bit of a div, I tried to drag my old hard disk onto the new one but that failed (obviously). I now need to get everything off my old hard disk and onto my new firewire disk and then make sure that the computer boots up from that one. How can I achieve this, should I install the OS (OS X 10.4.11) on the new disk and then copy over the files, and applications? Or would it be better to "find a way of cloning my drive onto the new disk.
More questions...do I need to make partitions on the new disk (I don't know what these are I'm afraid)
When I have set up the new drive as a boot disk, can I just unplug the old internel disk?
Grateful thanks to anyone who can assist thiscomputer illiterate technophobe.
Allen

Is it dangerous to use an external HD to boot from? The guy at Circuit City told me it was.
One danger of using an external hard drive as a boot drive, is the connection is not as reliable as an internal hard drive. The other is the mistaken assumption that just because it is separate, or not part of the computer, that it is safe. The only true safety comes in numbers. You should always backup your data*:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
2.5" hard drives are a little less reliable than 3.5" hard drives because of the smaller parts involved. Mac Minis have 2.5" hard drives, whereas other desktop Macs have 3.5" hard drives. Whether the reliability of Firewire or USB over SATA or Parallel ATA on 2.5" is enough to offset this difference is hard to say. Having enough backups ensures you don't have to be surprised when you find out in your situation.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Did 10.4.6 break booting from external hard Drives

Hi
This afternoon, I tried to clone my internal Hard Disk to an external drive. I do the regularly using Disk Utility, and I have not had and problems doing this until today. In fact, when I acquired my Power Mac three weeks ago I cloned my iMac's drive to the same external drive, and then cloned my Power Mac's drive from the external. I did have one hiccup during that last step - I had cloned to the PM's drive while running the PM off the external drive, and the clone was flawed, so I booted using my Tiger DVD and re-cloned the drive using Disk Utility off the DVD. All went well, and my Power Mac's been running flawlessly since.
That was before the 10.4.6 update. Usually, when I have a good known bootable external hard drive, I will only back up my home folder onto the drive. If I've gone through an OS update, or have some major application changes, I will opt to re-clone my internal drive. I did this today.
I tried restarting from the external drive. Yes, I did remember that 10.4.6 did offer that lovely second chime before truly starting up after upgrading, so I waited to see if spotlight was indexing the external drive. I waited 25 minutes. That only thing I saw was the grey apple and - maybe this is a clue - a couple seconds after showing up, that moved an half an inch down screen.
Has anybody been able to clone 10.4.6 to an external hard drive and successfully boot off it? Is my problem of today related to my problem of a couple weeks ago, and I need to run Disk Utility of the Tiger DVD to get a good clone?
My internal drive = 128 gigabytes, external = 118 gigabytes, about 29 gigabytes being transferred.
Thanks in advance.

Wish I figured out I was in the mail and address book forum before I posted. Oh Well.
It seems that there might be some sort of weird thing going on between my computer and Disk Utility when booted in the full OS. Earlier, I tried cloning my internal Hard disk using Carbon Copy Cloner, and it worked. My Power Mac boots off the external disk fine and everything runs flawlessly.

Booting macbook from external hard drive- Is it doable?

I've had my white macbook since 2006. (I LOVE IT) However, I'd like to use it as a "desktop" until I can get a mac mini. Is it possible to move EVERYTHING thats on it to an external hard drive (terabyte) and boot it up from there? Also, once I get the mac mini, will I be able to restore the macbook to its "original" state? I ask this because I only have a little over 6gigs left on my hard drive. (Lots of music, graphics, videos and apps) I bought a terabyte to free up some space, but still haven't been able to free up enough to make a difference. I am assuming (and i could be wrong) that I could just take everything on the mac and move it to the hard drive, boot it from there, and all will be well in the world.
So is it doable? (If it is… I might not even need to get the mac mini.)
Thanks a bunch in advance for any help...
"O"

Yes.
First, Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
Second, Clone using Restore Option of Disk Utility
Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder.
Select the destination volume from the left side list.
Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
Check the box labeled Erase destination.
Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
Destination means the external drive. Source means the internal startup drive.
Third, Open Startup Disk preferences, change the startup disk to the external drive, then click on the Restart button. The computer will now permanently boot from the external drive.

K9A2 Platinum esata port and Install and Usage of esata External Hard Drive

I just bought a sata hard drive and an icy dock enclosure for backup purposes. Having never used one before can someone explain how this works?
I have the hard drive in the enclosure, no problem there. I plugged it into the esata port on the back of my motherboard, but vista won't recognize it and when I reboot and go into the BIOS, I don't see it there either. I have purchased Acronis True Image 11 Home for backup and mirroring purposes. I wish to mirror my existing internal drive to this new external drive.
Questions:
1. Can I use the esata ports on the motherboard for this drive, or should I use the PCI bracket and plug it into one of the existing sata ports on the motherboard? If esata port, exactly how do they work? Are there BIOS settings for the esata ports or do they operate more like a usb connection?
2. Do I need to do anything with this drive before using it; format, install operating system...??
3. Are the esata external drive considered plug and play or do I need to plug it in before I boot my computer.
TIA.

Everything seems to be working as I would have expected at this point, with the exception of the size of the mirrored drives.
I decided to make another mirror onto the 3rd drive making all 3 drives identical. So now I would expect all three drives to show the same "GB free" while viewing with Vista explorer. The odd thing is, is that which ever drive I make bootable - SATA5 port and becomes the C: drive, shows 226GB free. The other drives, either as E: or J: will show as 268GB free. Most be an Acronis or Acronis user (me) issue/oddity?
But bottom line, the sata and esata ports seem to be working as I would expect. Though plugging the external hard drive in before booting (power on or off, needs to be unplugged from the esata port) seems to hang at the FasTrack screen as described above.
My only guess to why this all seems to be working currently is that I don't think I ever had my bios set correctly. After enabling the onboard controller, having the drive actually plugged into SATA5, then rebooting, selecting boot sequence and selecting the raid drive as the first boot device. At least this is my recollection, I made so many bios changes previously that I thought I had it all covered.
Any thoughts? I think I will try to get an answer on the Acronis size difference before I try to setup my RIAD 1, since that would require erasing two drives, per your instructions here: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=113738.0
Thanks for help once again.

External hard drive freezes on boot.

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