How to boot from FireWire disk?
I have made a copy of my main disk with CarbonCopy, using an external FireWire 800 disk. According to CC it should be bootable, but pressing Option during boot does not show the that disk as boot option. When I boot from the main disk and try to change the boot disk in Preferences, I get this message "You can't change the startup disk to your selected disk, the bless tool was unable to set the current disk".
Why am I doing this? I bought a 500GB disk to replace the 200GB internal disk. Wanted to restore the original content from the FireWire disk after swapping out the old disk. I could also restore from a TimeMachine backup I have on a USB disk, but that will take much longer and I have had issues with complete restores from TimeMachine backups in the past.
All recommendations are welcome
It sounds like that you didn't format the hard drive properly. If you want a bootable hard drive with an Intel powered Mac, you must choose the "GUID" partition scheme.
Use Disk Utility to verify whether your external hard drive is partitioned with GUID scheme or the Apple partition scheme. If the later, you'll need to reformat with the GUID scheme.
Similar Messages
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Hi,
I am running Macbook Pro, snow leopard 10.6.8
My resuce disk is based on 10.6.4
I tried to boot from rescue disk to repair the main disk.
I failed to boot from the rescue disk as my rescue disk (from CD) is not being recognized. I tried multiple options such as holding down "C", "c", "option" key etc while the system is restarting. Only the main disk was being shown as the bootable option (while holding down the option key when restarting) but not the rescue disk.
I verified that my rescue disk is good. Infact, I could boot a Lion MacBookPro using my resue disk.
Any inputs are appreciated.
Thanks
gbIt was 10.6.4 (Snow Leopard). It was the same as the rescue disk version.
thanks
gb -
I tried booting from the OS X DVD but the gray apple logo stays frozen. For some reason the PB froze up while using Entourage and it died completely. I tried Option/Apple/P/R and it did not work. I tried booting with c, with option and with X but it just doesn't work at all. Any suggestions?? Perhaps trying with a firewire connection to OS X (10.4.7) new MacBook Pro will work??
How do you dupe it?? Sorry for my ignorance. Right now I tried to restore the target PB HD and it gives me an error "invalid node structure" and it keeps telling me that it cannot repair the disk. It will not detect the hard disk or any files within it at all. It was working totally fine until I tried using Entourage this morning. Could it be a virus??
How can I recoup tthe data in this HD?? Any application you may suggest??
Thanks for your help!!
PBG417" Mac OS X (10.4.6) -
Problems in booting from Firewire disk
I had an iMac 400 G3 until recently, just got a mini Core Duo 1.66.
My Firewire 120 GB disk was always the main disk, but now I cannot install the Tiger disk that came with the Mac mini on it (it says my Mac cannot boot from this volume), even though it recognizes the disk just fine when I boot from the Mini's HD.
Maybe it's the system in it, since it has the 10.4.8. with PPC updates? Should I erase the system from my disk and try to install OS X on it?
Thanks a lot.The simplest way to do this is to connect your external drive to the mini and copy all your data from it to the mini's internal drive. Don't copy applications or MacOS, just the documents and files, video, music etc. Then use Disk Utilities (in Applications/utilities) to reformat the external.
Download and install a copy of CarbonCopyCloner (from www.versiontracker.com) and use it to copy the internal drive to the external.
Then open System Preferences/Startup Disk and set the external as the startup volume. Reboot and the system should then boot to the external which has a fully compatible copy of MacOS, complete with your documents, files, music etc.
The startup Disk preference pane can then be used to switch back to the internal if you should need to do so. -
Disk Utility says HD needs repair-how to boot from original disk?
Hi,
My iMac has been acting up badly. Finally on Friday, it had trouble turning on and a burning smell arose from the top. Came on but with the blinking folder with question mark. So turned it off and tried again to turn on: no chime and couldn't turn it on.
Went to Genius bar this a.m. Tried different cord. It turned on. Everything came up fine. Genius ran special test. Everything came back with green check. But he said the internal hard drive could very likely be starting to fail.
Back home. Just ran the Disk Utility to "Verify." It couldn't continue verification. Got these messages:
Invalid volume directory count.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.
Questions:
1) Can I repair using the First Aid utility (or is it more about getting a new HD)?
2) If so, can someone remind me what keys to press on startup to boot from the CD?
3) I have 10.5.8 right now. Can I still boot from the original Tiger installation CD and use that Disk Utility?
Thanks for your urgently needed help!If you're on 10.5.8 have you not got that disk as that would probably be the best one to use? If not, the disk that came with your Mac should still boot up. Disk in drive and restart holding down the 'C' key. Hopefully it'll boot - albeit slowly. At the multi-language screen choose your language and at the next screen from the menu bar select Utilities>Disk Utility. Select Macintosh HD on the left and 'repair disk'. Hopefully it'll do the necessary repairs. If it fixes anything click 'repair disk' again until you get a clean pass and then from the Apple menu restart as normal.
If you haven't got a backup make sure you make one ASAP. -
Can i & how to boot from install disk copy to reinstall os10.4
i am farly computer illerate, sorry...this is a two parter: i have an older g4 that was running 10.2 and it has malfunctioned in that it isn't showing the finder or disk or any other plugged in periphial device like my usb hub or flash drive or camera or card reader or mp3 player. i have alot of i tunes and want to save to a different g4 i just picked up that seems to operate good. it's running 10.4.11 and the guy i got it from gave me a set of copies of that software install disks.
first i can't use firewire conections because the old computer freezes up anytime i get it booted and try to acess anything...i heard that i could put the old hard drive in the working machile and copy my library. i did this (after finally figuring out to set the jumpers correctly!) and it put some of my music on but not all of it...i put the old drive back in the old machine and the complete library is still there so.
i'm currently in process of downloading those cd's i still have access to and have accepted i'm going to lose the rest...
question 1: is there some way to get them from the older hard drive when it's in the newer machine as a slave drive?
question 2: can (and if so, how do i go about it, literally) rebooting to it and reinstalling a newer software version fix my older computer, or at least recover all it's memory so i can useit as extra storage?
)0Yes, you can format it, but honestly, with it being only 20 GB, quite old & possibly next to failing, as well as drives that are faster & 25 times as big are fairly cheap... myself, believing in Karma, would find somebody that has less & would be willing to work with it.
>Stoopid technology...
I titally agree, & anymore the tech seems only directed at Bloat, Obsolesence, if it doesn't work just buy the newest/latest/greatest until 6 monts down the line.
I'm in biz for myself and can tell you that it doesn't pay to sell things that last for 5,10, 20 or more years, give solid advice for free... I'll likely be out of biz within 2 months after 40 years & be $200K in the hole. -
FYI....boot from SAN is required for physical server (T4-1) (not OVM).
1) How to Boot from SAN for T4-1 Server with Solaris 11.1 OS on the disk?
The SAN disks allocated are visible in ok prompt. below is the output.
(0) ok show—disks
a) /pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci@f/pci@0/usb@0, 2/hub@2/hub@3/storage@2/disk
b) /pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci€a/SUNW, ezalxs@0, l/fp@0, 0/disk
e) /pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci@a/SUNW, ealxs@0/fp@0, 0/disk
d) /pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci@8/SUNW, emlxs@0, l/fp@0, 0/disk
e) /pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci@8/SUNW,enlxs@0/fp@0,0/disk
f) /pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci@4/scsi@0/disk
g) /pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4/scsi@0/disk
h) /iscsi—hba/disk
q) NO SELECTION
valid choice: a. . .h, q to quit c
/pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci@a/SUNW, ealxs@0/fp@0, 0/disk has been selected.
Type “Y ( Control—Y ) to insert it in the command line.
e.g. ok nvalias mydev “Y
for creating devalias mydev for /pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci@a/SUNW,emlxs@0/fp@0,0/disk
(0) ok set—sfs—boot
set—sfs—boot ?
We tried selecting a disk and applying sfs-boot at ok prompt.
Can you please help me providing detailed pre-requesites/steps/procedure to implement this and to start boot from SAN.
2) How to SMI Label/Format a disk while OS Installation in Solaris 11.1?
As we know that ZFS is the default filesystem in Solaris 11.
We have seen in the Oracle documentation that for rpool below are recommended:
- A disk that is intended for a ZFS root pool must be created with an SMI label, not an EFI label.
- Create root pools with slices by using the s* identifier.
- ZFS applies an EFI label when you create a storage pool with whole disks.
- In general, you should create a disk slice with the bulk of disk space in slice 0.
I have seen the solution that using format -e, we change the labelling but all the data will be lost, whats the way to apply a SMI Label/Format on a rpool disks while OS Installation itself.
Please provide me the steps to SMI Label a disk while installaing Solaris 11.1 OS.Oracle recommends below things on rpool: (thats reason wanted to apply SMI Label)
I have seen in the Oracle documentation that for rpool below are recommended:
- A disk that is intended for a ZFS root pool must be created with an SMI label, not an EFI label.
- Create root pools with slices by using the s* identifier.
- ZFS applies an EFI label when you create a storage pool with whole disks.
- In general, you should create a disk slice with the bulk of disk space in slice 0. -
Booted from firewire external disk, internet slow
Hi,
My iMac is currently being booted from external disk via Firewire 800. I have to do this until I receive new install disks from apple to resore my machine.
The computer is usable, however internet is very slow... I have other devides, windows machine, ipad, iphone and they all run okay.
It seems that because I have booted via the external disk..... internet is slow. Could this be as the OS is needed to refer to the external disk?
Any suggestions to correct this please?
thanks
MarkI need to restore from a time machine backup - full system restore, only possible from orignial install disks supplied with my imac apparently.
The bootable external disk , is actually the orignial boot disk, however has disk problems - SMART warning, and when trying to restore this disk to the new installed disk, it fails.
I can only boot from it, and run some of the apps on it.
I know that it seems strange that I have slow internet, but it seems to be the case.
Internet seems to pause lots of times, I wonder if its something to do with tmp files on the external disk.
I have tried downloading Lion to upgrade and use this as a method of getting a bootable system, but Lion has been downloading for 3 days, and I have had to abort a couple of times.
It does seem odd, but cant think of anything else. -
MBP Retina 15" MID 2014 2.5Ghz
OS X Yosemite 10.10
I have a external HDD and want to erase and restore my laptop so I can install windows via Bootcamp Assistant but I don't know how to boot from a clone to fix the issue and am not sure if when I erase and restore I will still have Yosemite 10.10? I have no way to reinstall the OS if I lose it. An average user friendly guide would be greatly appreciated pleaseI do not think you have to erase your MacBook's disk in order to install Windows. First of all you can try a few things before formatting the disk.
The first thing you should do is to check that your MacBook Pro's drive is OK with Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities). After opening it, choose "Macintosh HD" in the sidebar and press "Verify Disk". If it gives you any error, you will have to boot your Mac in OS X Recovery (press Command and R keys while your Mac is starting up) to repair Macintosh HD (the steps are the same but pressing "Repair Disk" instead of "Verify Disk").
After you have repaired the drive, boot up in OS X and try partitioning the drive again with Boot Camp Assistant. If it does not work, you will have to format the drive and reinstall OS X, but I will give you these steps only if this does not work. -
How to Boot From an External HD
I am still pondering getting a mini - I know that I will want a much larger hard drive (since I want to use it for media and will keep tons of video and music on it). I would like to know how to boot from an external hard drive. I've searched google, the forums, and apple support, and see people mention it all the time, but can't find out how to do it, etc. Is it just like running off my normal HD but all the files are kept on the external (so I could still access files thru itunes, etc.)?
Also, I would like to get a 500GB+ drive to keep my files on, and was wondering if people had recomendations. Brands, USB 2.0 or Firewire, etc.
Apologies if this is a novice question - but I can't seem to find answers anywhere.
Thanks in advance.Firstly, it is certainly possible to boot from an external drive, so what you plan is not only feasible, but since the external would be faster than the internal drive, also rather beneficial to the efficient running of the mini - meaning, the system will be notably faster in use.
In my view, the best option is an external firewire drive, not USB. The reason is that FW has it's own dedicated controller while USB doesn't. In effect, it means that FW data transfer speeds are stable and consistent, while USB rates vary widely, depending on what else the system is doing.
Once you have your external drive connected, the easiest way to make it bootable is to copy your existing MacOS install from the internal drive using software such as Carbon Copy Cloner (downloadable from www.versiontracker.com). This will avoid having to do a lengthy reinstall. Once MacOS is copied, then open System Preferences, and the Startup Disk preference pane, and click on the external drive icon. The next restart will then be directed to the external.
Once you have booted from the external drive, you use it just as you would an internal, and MacOS will treat it as the boot volume, including by default, placing your user account folders on it, including your documents, music etc. -
Boot from FireWire External Drive WITHOUT mounting internal Hard Drive
Is it possible too boot a PowerBook G4 over FireWire (this part works) WITHOUT mounting the internal hard drive at boot time - i.e. never mount the internal hard drive when booting from FireWire?
There is an Oreilly article at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/h/341 which discusses using "niutil" but it is not clear how to indicate the internal hard drive should not be mounted.
The boot from FireWire works fine but how do you tell Mac OS X to ignore and never mount the internal hard drive? There used to be an /etc/fstab file where you could specify drives to mount. The /etc/fstab.hd file comments now say "IGNORE THIS FILE.
This file does nothing, contains no useful data, and might go away in
future releases. Do not depend on this file or its contents."
Thanks,That is not the problem - I have been using the startup manager by holding down the option key during boot-up. I am having no problem getting the PowerBook to boot from the FireWire Drive.
*The Problem* is that after the PowerBook has booted from the exernal FireWire drive, I still see the internal hard drive of the PowerBook on the desktop. I do not want this. Some key points to note:
[1] I can unmount the interal hard drive and remove from the desktop only by using the Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilities folder. There is a button there to "unmount selected volume"
[2] The finder does not have an icon next to the internal hard drive icon to allow the internal hard drive to be unmounted when booted from a FireWire drive
[3] I want the MacOS X kernel to be configured to not automount any hard drive volumes at bootup - this used to be possible by editing the /etc/fstab.hd file but that file does not appear to be used any more per the commennts in the file.
**Remaining Question** How do you configure the MacOS X kernel to prevent it from mounting any other hard drive at boot time? I do not want to use methods [1] or [2]
Thanks -
Hard drive failure - how to boot from replacement?
the hard drive in my Mac Mini has become unbootable - I've gone through all the options suggested in Apple support docs including trying to boot from install disk. I don't get a startup screen to select where to boot from, jus the gray spinning gear. I fear the drive is dead. It was preceeded by strange behavior of permissions. Most of what I read is advice on installing a replacement drive but copying info from the old. How does one create a new bootable drive? I'm thinking of replacing the hard drive with SSD. Thanks Rich
AHT (apple-hardware-test), at least on 10.9-era macs, seems to do *no* tests at all of the hard-driver or SSD. You have to use other testing methods, to run SMART long and short self-tests of SSD and HD as detailed below, and google is your friend.
=== Details ===
For AHT: Power-off. Hold-down "option" and "d" keys, and keep holding them down while you power on. After a minute or two it will boot Apple Hardware Test from internet, at least for 10.9-era hardware. Use a network cable if you can. With known-bad or missing hard-drives, the AHT still says "no problems found".
For example, I have had 3 new macs in 3 weeks that all have hard-drives that always report "read-failure" to SMART tests. The Apple Hardware Test apparently does NOT do any testing of hard-drive(s) at all. Not only did say "No problems found" with the bad-drive(s), if you remove the hard-drive completely it still reports "No problems found"! You may want to run some long SMART tests on hard-drive(s) weekly, even if they are brand new... the 3 that failed on me were different brands from different stores: all reported "read-failure" in around 30 hours. So I conclude that consumer-drives have very poor quality... in effect, the end-user is doing the QA tests by using the drive as apparently little QA goes on at factory. And/or the shipping folks are really throwing those things around hard.
To run SMART tests on a mac, you can "brew install smartmontools" and "brew install gsmartcontrol". Or if you are not a command-line person, you can get a 14-day trial of Drive-DX disk-health tester (looks like ja smartctl-gui-wrapper) from:
http://binaryfruit.com/drivedx They also have a links to a SMART-SAT driver that lets you run smart tests on almost any newer usb-enclosed HD or SSD. Nice
If mac won't boot at all from disk, you can rescue/recover by booting from usb or live-cd such as gparted-live-cd/usb (which boots most intel macs as it has the guid bootability):
http://www.ehow.com/how_8505863_boot-gparted-cd-mac.html
PartedMagic is really nice and boots every intel mac I've tried it on, but is no longer free. Right on desktop is "Disk Health" (which runs gsmartcontrol). Also has ddrescue, testdisk, photorec, etc. Sees HFS+ just fine. -
After copying all of my old drive onto a newer one I want to have all the computers that previously used the old drive boot into the new one. I can see the drive on my main server desktop but cannot boot from it. Any suggestions or readings you can suggest?
Several questions.
What application did you use to copy the files? SuperDuper! (full disk cloning is free; a very good app by the way). Carbon Copy Cloner? Both of these apps will clone a disk and make it bootable.
Were you able to boot from this disk before?
Is this disk an external firewire or USB? As far as I know all Mac with a firewire port can boot from a firewire bootable disk. I think only more recent Macs can boot from a USB disk.
You mentioned server. Are you by any chance trying to do a NetBoot? After all this is the *Networking and Web* forum. If so then the Mac OS X Server forum might be a better place to ask about NetBooting. -
How to boot from DVD & how to force eject DVD
Hi,
Just installed a new HD on my MBP. I inserted the leopard DVD and it was spinning for about 2 minutes and then nothing happned. Just black screen. Now I tried starting holding the C key down. Nothing. I tried starting holding the eject button down, no eject of the DVD. I tried holding the button below the tracklpad down, no eject of the DVD.
How to boot from a DVD?
How to force eject DVD?
What am I doing wrong?I hope you get an answer to this as I'm sturggling to
A) start my computer as it just goes to a grey screen
B) Force Eject a DVD
Someone suggested the below on another thread, it didn't work for me but maybe it will work for you.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5869652#5869652
Re: Stuck on Grey Screen.. Won't Boot
Posted: Nov 16, 2007 1:34 PM in response to: aliray10 Reply Email
(I don't have my (no-longer booting) iBook in front of me to check this, but I think this is what I did last night....)
Boot single user -- hold down "cmd-S" immediately after you turn the computer on.
"diskutil list" will give you a list of your disks. My CD drive was disk1.
"diskutil eject disk" should eject the target disk. -
goal:
I would like to boot from a USB pendrive
specs:
MSI K8N neo platinum (bios 1.4/1.56)
Transcend jetflash 256MB
problem:
The system does not boot from the disk
what i tried:
i made the usb stick bootable in 2 differend ways:
- i used the included software to make it bootable
- i used mkbt.exe to make a bootrecord
i updated the bios from 1.4 to 1.56
i did try to boot with the F11 option
i did set the primary boot order to USB-ZIP and i also tryed USB-FDD and USB-HDD
i also enabled the USB storage device in the bios
i tried to get the USB stick as a disk drive while booting from a disk, which also failed
is there anyone who have a idea how-to make it bootable?
i'm kinda out of idea'swhat more specs do you want?
specs:
MSI K8N neo platinum (bios 1.4/1.56)
Transcend jetflash 256MB
AMD 64 3200+
Zalman cooler
2 512 Kingston memory
2 Maxtor HD
2 CD/DVD drives
ATI 9600 VGA card
i would like to boot from a pendrive for various reasons, but mostly because i would like to boot in Dos or Linux.
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