G5 won't boot from external hard drive

I have installed Leopard on my external hard drive, but have not gone through the 'setup'. I want to boot my G5 from the hd now, but when I restart holding down the option key, the internal hard drive is the only option that appears. When I do boot from the internal hd, the external hd is recognised perfectly and I can see all the files and everything - I just can't seem to boot from it. The newer iMac I used to install Leopard on the external hd will boot from it, but the G5 refuses to recognise it in the boot options.
Any help much appreciated.

No. If you boot an installer disc on an Intel Mac it will only install an Intel version of OS X. You would need to boot the installer disc on the G5 then install OS X onto your external drive. However, if you do that you will not be able to boot the Intel Mac with the external drive. The only solution to using one external drive on both computers is to partition the drive. Install OS X on one partition using the G5, and install OS X on the other partition using the Intel Mac.

Similar Messages

Booting from external hard drive on intel-based MacBook Pro

Good day everyone. I know similar questions were raised in this community, but I still have some questions.
I have MacBook Pro(late 2011) with OS X 10.7.5 and external hard drive with Ubuntu 13.04, from wich i can boot succefully on my PC. But MacBook Pro will not boot from my external drive, no matter which key/combination i use during restart.
After googling I found some answers to my initial question, how to boot from external hard drive
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1852633?start=0&tstart=0
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/faq/macbook-pro-boot-from-exte rnal-firewire-or-usb-drive.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1948
As I understand I need to format my external hard drive into GUID partition type and this will be enough to be able to boot from it on my mac?
With this new partition type, will I be able to install ubuntu again on my external drive?
Does GUID partition type supports NTFS, ext4 and FAT32, linux swap?(I use ntfs for big files, ext4 as partition for ubuntu and fat32, because i use windows, linux and osx)
Will I be able to boot from my pc from my external drive with this new partition type?
What are downsides, if any, to GPT?
here is info on my e-drive

LowLuster wrote:
The only OS that will boot from an external drive is Mac OS X or maybe Linux. For OS X to be installed on any drive it need to be formatted Mac OS Extended and have GUID partition table.
As for Linux I'm not that familiar with it but again for a Mac to boot it need an EFI partition on the drive and I don't think that is possible with NTFS or FAT32 let alone the native Linux format.
Went to wiki to learn more on efi but found artice on uefi.
Operating system loaders are a class of the UEFI applications. As such, they are stored as files on a file system that can be accessed by the firmware, called EFI System partition (ESP). Supported file systems include FAT32, FAT16 and FAT12, and supported partition table scheme is GPT only. UEFI does not rely on a boot sector, although ESP provides space for it as part of the backwards compatibility.[26]
Here is FAQ on official uefi website.
Can UEFI Secure Boot be adopted and implemented by a variety of operating systems?
UEFI specifications are platform-independent, supporting multiple platforms and architectures. In addition, UEFI specifications are designed to promote cross-functionality, as well as to support broad adoption across multiple operating systems, including Windows as well as Linux-based operating systems. The specifications are robust and can potentially complement—or even advance—other distributions, such as Linux-based distributions.
And here is wiki article on GPT expaining OS support.
It is obvious both uefi and GPT are ok with Linux and file systems such as FAT32, ext4 and NTFS.
I guess there is no much difference(or is that the same thing?) between uefi and efi used in Macs.
In your answer to Stark Industries you said that mac can boot linux from external hard drive, well this is not the info i got of official website and it is still my question, because your answer is very inconclusive and your info is partially incorrect

Why won't my iMac 27" boot from external hard drive?

I have a new 27in Intel i5 dual core 3.6GHz iMac. It works wonderfully.
My question is this. I have a Pleides Ice Cube external hard drive with a USB 2.0/Firewire enclosure with a 500GB hard drive. I used diskutility to format the hard drive as a GUID Partition Table. I then used SuperDuper to clone the iMac OS 10.6.7 and Apps over to it.
I can select the external drive in System Preferences/Startup Disk to boot from, but when booting the iMac gets as far as the white screen then just stops loading.
I have tried both the USB connection and the Firewire connection (with a Firewire 800 to 400 cable).
I have run Disk Utility and repaired the disk and the preferences.
I have used Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory as well, but the iMac will not boot from the drive.
It does boot from the original DVD's and its own hard drive.
My old 24" iMac had no trouble booting from this hard drive or any of the others I have collected over the years, so I am reluctant to think it is the external drive. It is something to do with this particular processor Snow Leopard and external drives.

It sounds like something in the SuperDuper clone might not have copied well. To get the full answer on that I would check with Apple or SuperDuper to see if they support each other.
As a quick test, if you restart and immediately press and hold "option" on your keyboard do you see your external HD as an option to boot from? If so, click it and see if the boot runs any differently, but if you don't see it at all that could show that the problem is more deep rooted.
Personally, if looking in to either of those didn't give me any other info to go on, I would reformat and start the clone again. BTW, do you know for sure GUID Partition is the format you'd want to do this on? Generally macs use "Mac OS Extended" and some external HDs can use "FAT32" (if you want them to work well with Windows)
Hope that gives a little direction
Alex

Boot from external hard drive

I have just loaded Leopard 10.5 wonderful but not overwhelming. It deleted OS 9 and now ALL my cool classic games won't run. I have a eMac G4...Can I add an external hard drive..load OS9 on it and boot and run my games???

Bill W wrote:
If your eMac was capable of booting directly into OS9 before,
I suspect that any eMac which could boot OS 9 would have to be 800 or 700 MHz units, and therefore will have problems installing Leopard. (Min speed: 867 MHz, and the installer checks.)
then yes you can install it on an external drive (firewire), assuming the OS9 installer sees the external drive. I think you might also be able to reload OS9 onto your internal drive without partitioning. If that doesn't work, another option is to partition the internal drive and install 9 on a separate partition.
The OS 9 System Folder may still be around. (I don't know, I haven't installed Leopard yet.) However, Classic is dead and gone on Leopard.
His best bet would be to get an external drive, install a pre Leopard version of OS X (and Classic) on it, and reboot from that drive when he wants to run Classic. I have already set up an external drive to do just that in the event that I need to run Classic on my iMac. My eMac will simply stay at Tiger.

My PB G4 won't boot from any hard drive..stucked in apple icon..

At first, it didn't boot from the internal hard drive...
I could see the apple icon with grey background, but the little runing icon under apple icon didn't appear. There is no sound from the hard drive either...
I tried removing and replacing the RAM, didn't work either...
I have the powerbook CD with apple hardware test, I ran it. It went though a detail test and showed no errors or problems....
And then I tried to start up from the powerbook CD, it works and I was able to go to disk utility. However, I cannot complete verifying disk permission because of a lot of problem, sometimes it said "communication error with disk manager" and sometimes it got frozen and sometimes it just simply stop moving (not frozen, but just not moving, the disk is quite also too).
then I tried to boot from my USB external hard drive, I had my backup in it. However, it is the same as booting from internal drive, no running icon below the apple icon. Also, the external hard drive did not make any sound.
I have never experienced this problem... please help...

Have you added any hardware or new software recently?
Have you tried a safe boot? Hold the shift key while you boot - this does some disk maintenance and doesn't load login items. If this works, try booting normally.
If you can't run Disk Utility verify permissions from the OS X CD did you also try to verify or repair the disk? If this won't work due to errors, you may want to consider a program like Disk Warrior to attempt to repair the hard drive. You can find it at http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

MacBook won't boot from new hard drive.

I'm trying to upgrade my hard drive, but my macbook will not boot to the new hard drive. I have erased and cloned the hard drive about three times now, using both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper. It won't boot while it is in the macbook and it won't boot from an external hard drive case. All I get to is the screen with the mac logo and the spinning wheel. I have made sure the drive is GUID formatted, but it still doesn't work. When I put the new drive in an external case and plug it into the USB port of my macbook I can see and access everything on the drive. Can somebody please tell what I am doing wrong?
By the way the new hard drive is a 500gb western digital Scorpio blue drive.

I got a new hard drive recently 500gb seagate. I followed the directions on this page http://www.ehow.com/how2063795format-hard-drive-mac-os.html , Mine was a little more complicated since i had 2 partitions windows and mac on mine. Initially the process took a day and it started getting to the same thing as yours where it would get to the mac logo and not find the hard drive. I reformatted several times before i got to the point where i could boot up.Eventually I just figured out all the info was there the drive was formatted i could boot into windows 7 but not mac. So i put old hard drive back in the computer booted up with that. Attached new hard drive via usb in external case i was trying to put in the mac. I was able not to boot up but it would show the drives that have been formatted into the new drive and i simply copied my existing Disk by dragging it onto the new hard drive. Than turn off your mac keep your hard drive plugged in. Press and hold the option key in start up and you should see the 2 seperate hard drives and be able to boot into the new one. Was a long process for me took several complete deletes of the new hard drive and reformatting before it would work. once you get to the mac logo and spinning wheel its just saying mac cant find your boot up disk though. Sorry its confusing a bit any questions email me.

Can't boot from external hard drive with Snow Leopard

I bought a new Macbook Air with Lion. I have my old Snow Leopard installation cloned onto an external hard drive, and I want to boot from it. I can choose my external hard drive during boot, it shows the Apple logo, but after that the screen goes black and nothing happens. Is there a way to fix this?

Can't be done. Snow Leopard does not contain necessary drivers and perhaps other items required for OS X on the 2011 MBA. In fact, the version of Lion on the App store won't install on the 2011 MBA.
This is totally normal in Apple's world. A new version of MAC hardware that comes with a new version of OS X installed usually will not operate correctly with previous versions of OS X.

Hard drive dead/Boot from external hard drive?

My hard drive failed and I need a new one. For the time being, I'd prefer not to open up my iMac and replace the internal hard drive. I have an external USB hard drive and I cannot install OSX onto this drive (strangely, it takes the first disc but not the second).
Is it possible to boot and run an iMac G5 from an external hard drive? If so, what is required for hardware and what steps need to be taken?
If not, what course of action would you recommend?

It is very easy to boot an iMac from an external drive, but the drive should be a Firewire drive. Get one, then get SuperDuper!, which will enable you to clone your data and system to it. You can then choose the external firewire as your boot drive and operate without any problems.
Apparently, there are ways to boot from a USB drive, but they are complicated and a firewire drive is very straightforward and fast.
Let us know how you make out,

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 from external hard drive

Hello.
How do I install Mac OS X on an external hard drive, or have Mac OS X running on an external hard drive and boot from it? I tried to install to it and it says Mac OS X cannot be booted from this drive.
What should I do?

Remy,
SuperDuper is another option, but...Note also that USB drives do not allow booting Power PC based Macintoshes under any version of Mac OS X: this is not a SuperDuper! limitation, but one of the OS. If you would like to boot from a backup stored on an external drive, and have a Power PC based Mac, please purchase a Mac compatible FireWire drive.;~)

Panther is installed but won't boot from iBook hard drive

Hello,
I made a similar post in the iBooks colors section of Discussions on this topic not quite knowing whether this was a hardware or software issue. I finally got Panther to install after using Disk Doctor to check for and fix errors on 9.2.2 (I would never use with OSX) and also rebuilt the directory while booted from an OS 9 CD and running Disk Warrior from a floppy and taking out the airport card. The Panther CD told me to restart the computer after installation. During the OSX start up from the hard drive I saw a gray screen and the dark gray Apple logo with the spinning gear then the computer crashed and a message appeared that I needed to restart the computer. After restart, the same sequence of events happened again. I have tried to restart from the OSX using the full retail CD used for intallation and the computer also crashes. I cannot start up from the Disk Warrior CD either. I have also tried make a Safe Mode start up and the iBook again crashed with the restart message appearing again. When I restart in OS 9 everything works perfectly, OS, airport and applications. I did have Jaguar installed on this iBook until five months ago, but incounterred issues with it and decided that more RAM would solve my problem. I then decided to initialize the hard drive and reinstall OSX after purchasing 256 RAM. The 256 stick of RAM was bought from ifixit.com and a guy there told me he thought that the logic board needed to be replaced. I explained to him that the computer works perfectly fine in the OS 9 mode, but he said that 0SX is more demanding and 9 can get by on less than perfect logic board. I also reinstalled the 128 MB RAM that was in the computer when Jaguar was running on it, but that didn't help either. I have scoured the iBook and Panther OSX sections of Discussions for any others having a similar problem, but not such luck.
I would appreciate any information or suggestion that you might have as to what may be causing this issue on my iBook.
Thank you.
Greg
iBook Mac OS X (10.3.5) 300 mhz 320 MB RAM

Greg:
You have probably already tried this, but the first thing I would do is reset the PRAM.
1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.
Also, check out this Apple article Your Mac won't start up in OS X.
Good luck.
cornelius
PismoG4 550, 100GB 5400 Toshiba internal, 1 GB RAM; Pismo 500 OS X (10.4.5) Mac OS X (10.4.5) Beige G3 OS 8.6

Mac won't restore from external hard drive due to lack of memory

I downloaded a clock from the app store and upon starting it my mac crashed. Everytime I turned I got a screen that said to turn it off. I eventually restored it from the internet. However I had previously backed up my harddrive using time machine and wanted to resore it from the external hard drive I used. Whenever I boot up into restore mode and go through the prompts to get to the option to restore from backup it says that my mac does not have enough memory to restore from back up and it wont let me. Can anyone please help me?

It sounds like you had a drive malfunction. The least you should do is run the Apple Hardware Test before you try to restore.
Using Apple Hardware Test

My mac won't boot from the hard drive

Hi Everyone
Yesterday, I tried to dual boot my mac using the Bootcamp Assistant. The hard drive partitioned fine & then started the Windows setup. About half way through it found a corrupt file & cancelled the install. It went back to OSX absolutely fine & was working perfectly. I deleted the partition that had been created & then noticed that the amount of free space on my hard drive was missing the 20GB that I had partitioned off for Windows. I used OnyX to try & find the missing 20GB; it finished & then I tried to open Safari & received an error message. I tried again & received the same message so tried to restart the mac & ever since it hasn't wanted to boot using the hard drive.
It will boot from the CD & I can use the Disc Utility to see the hard drive (which makes me think that the mac is seeing it) & can verify & repair both the disc itself & the Disc Permissions but if I click Startup Disc I only get 2 options: The DVD itself & Network Drive. I also can't re-install OSX onto the Hard Drive as it comes up with an exclamation mark & wont let me go any further in the process.
I'm hoping that someone will have an answer other than erasing my hard drive & starting again (which isn't that big a problem as I backed up all the important bits before starting any of this!)

Why did you wipe the drive?
Were you having problems?
If you were those problem may be related to a failing hard drive and that is why the TM backup could be restored.
In you topic header you say the system won't boot from the SL DVD, But it di for you to wipe the drive. Then it should again boot from the SL DVD.
Insert the DVD and reboot, hold down the Option key and select the Optical drive, SL DVD, as the Boot source.

[SOLVED]Booting from external hard drive

Hi,
My SATA controller seems to be dead, I put my hard drive in an external USB bay. I would like to boot from it so that I still have exactly the same system running, but I'm facing a few issues with grub :
title Arch Linux
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 resume=/dev/sda4 root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet
initrd /boot/kernel26.img
I was surprised to see grub show up right after power on, and starting boot sequence. It then stopped complaining that /dev/sda2 was not found, and I was left in a minimal shell environment.
I tried replacing sda by sdb, since I was this was the new designator for my partitions since they are now mounted in USB, but with no luck.
Does anyone knows what do I need to change in the menu.lst, or elsewhere ?
Thanks in advance !
Last edited by willy9 (2010-01-20 16:17:38)

1. you need to rebuild your initramfs with adding the usb hook after 'autodetect'. You might need to chroot into your installation from ubuntu (for example) and then perform the rebuild.
2. add rootdelay as gusar suggested.
3. Hint: Due to you're booting from a external hard drive, I strongly recommend you to set labels to your drives. In this way, you can tell to /etc/fstab which are the proper partitions of your system avoiding the not-so-friendly-for-the-reader uuid string. This will help you to keep away udev messing with your drive's nodes.
in my case, I have a /etc/fstab which looks like this
LABEL="IOMEGA" / ext3 noatime,nodiratime 0 1
for extX filesystems, you can set its label with tune2fs -L label. For other filesystems, RTFM.
Last edited by kjon (2010-01-17 00:19:03)

Won't Boot from Internal Hard Drive

I received the "Startup Disk is Full" message and neglected to do anything about it before my Mac stopped booting. To remedy this, I installed and booted from Snow Leopard (10.6) on an external hard drive, found what was eating my space on my internal hard drive (currently Mac OS 10.5.8) and freed up about 35 GB of space.
I then went to my System Preferences to change the default Startup Disk back to the internal drive. It's not booting past the gray screen.
Any ideas on how to fix this? Do I now need to update my internal hard drive to Snow Leopard? If so, will this erase anything on my internal drive?

Hmm.
Do you have your external drive connected?
Try booting with the ALT key held down. Is your internal drive an option here? Choose it, then give the computer 5~10 minutes to boot.
If that doesn't work, try holding the Shift key and starting up in Safe Mode, which will take 5~10 minutes.
Do you have your OS X install discs for 10.5?
~Lyssa

G5 won't boot from external hard drive

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