Repairing boot drive from an external drive

I want to verify and if need be repair my startup disk (as i have never done it).
I don't have access to my original install DVD as it is in an apartment overseas!
But is this safe or possible?
My system is 10.4.4 but I have a bootable version 10.2.8 on a lacie firwire drive as a back-up copy of my old system.
In disk utility in 10.2.8, my new 10.4.4 internal drive shows up with the option to verify and repair it.
Is it safe to do this?
Most people recommend booting from the original starup CD to repair the internal boot drive.
Is there any difference or danger in running the repair form an old backup on a firewire drive.
Thanks in advance for any advice or help.
Kerim

You can verify a Mac OS X 10.44 system while booted to it by using 10.44's Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. Using a version of Disk Utility which came with a system prior to 10.39 on a 10.4 or newer system is not safe.
(10666)

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Get Help Online
Disk Utility
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Isn't there an advantage to having it on an external as well?
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best regards

Hi,
without the preperations to be made, that are outlined in the link I gave, Windows always tries to read and write certain files during bootup, which it can't find when you 'only' have a Windows on an external HD.
I only know of these instructions to get Windows on external HDs to work.
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. http://www.micromat.com/index.php?option=com_simpleboard&Itemid=42&func=view&cat id=7&id=786
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That may have been the only combination of search terms I didn't try. But still, I figured I'd try the Apple Discussions, as they're generally full of knowledgeable people, and did not want to try this on my own for fear of screwing up my computer.

Want to boot XP from an external disk? Here's how:

Has to be a USB 2.0 drive:
http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=1015
By: gradenko
Source: www.onmac.net
[edit: you have to keep the 5GB NTFS parition on your internal drive for this to work]
Hello, I cannot find a working solution for this posted so I'll post the solution I came up with (well, cobbled together from other people's hard work). I am using a MacBook Pro and an external G-Tech Q drive that supports USB 2.0. While XP does not officially support booting from a USB drive there is a way around it.
This solution requires access to a PC and is a bit time-consuming.
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9. Once XP comes up install your BootCamp device drivers.
Good luck! I just now finished this so I have some testing to do. A very big thank you to emmanual from ngine.

Hi,
without the preperations to be made, that are outlined in the link I gave, Windows always tries to read and write certain files during bootup, which it can't find when you 'only' have a Windows on an external HD.
I only know of these instructions to get Windows on external HDs to work.
If it weren't for games you like to play, I would suggest to have a look at the 'Virtualization' apps like Parallels or VMWare Fusion.
But these aren't good for playing games.
Sorry
Stefan

Boot xp from an External HD

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Hi,
without the preperations to be made, that are outlined in the link I gave, Windows always tries to read and write certain files during bootup, which it can't find when you 'only' have a Windows on an external HD.
I only know of these instructions to get Windows on external HDs to work.
If it weren't for games you like to play, I would suggest to have a look at the 'Virtualization' apps like Parallels or VMWare Fusion.
But these aren't good for playing games.
Sorry
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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.

Repairing boot drive from an external drive

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