Start up with external Drive connected and switched on

When starting up with my external USB2 drive connected, it takes ages, I usually resort to switching it off and then back on when my Mac has started. Has anyone got any tips on how to speed up the start up process?
Cheers

Sounds like it may well be the photos (or more likely any video in iphoto) rather than the drive that is causing the issues.
Have you installed all the updates for imovie including the ilife compatibility update.

Similar Messages

Best practices with external drives connected to Time Capsule?

I'm enjoying my new MBP but the storage limitations are a challenge with twenty+ years of data. I know it's not technically sanctioned by Apple but in another forum I found a discussion about successfully connecting an external drive to the Time Capsule. I tried this for a few months and had some problems, so I wonder if anyone here might have some insight into which of my drives would be best to use in this way and what, if anything, I must do to bless it for the task.
The drive most highly recommended in the forums at the time is the WD My Book. After buying it I learned that is Windows users install a package and update the driver for use with Time Machine, which Mac users are not able to do. The driver is available on the web but it's said to cause problems with Mountain Lion, which I can confirm. It's USB 3.0 and powered, though, which my two alternatives are not. It's also 2 TB and presently in two partitions. I also have a Seagate Free Agent GoFlex 500 which gets extremely hot with any use and an Iomega eGo Helium 500 I've been using for backups. Both are USB 2.0.
My goal is to put my iTunes Library and Time Capsule on the net (running 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz, averages 50Mbs). When I did this for a few months with the WD both its shares frequently dropped off my Desktop, as if powered down or something. Also there were the issues with Time Machine many others are having. Right now our video collection sits on the Time Capsule. Would it make sense to move our video to the WD and run iTunes and Time Machine on it? If so, do you have any tips for formatting, petitioning, or drivers (or anything else) to help this run smoothly? The WD works fine when hard-wired and the TC, too is fine without the WD at the party.
With apologies for the tome.

kevlee64 wrote:
Thanks, but the drive is connected directly to the back of the Time Capsule by an ethernet cable.
Ah, that's a different colored horse.
You have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive, not a USB external drive connected to the USB port.
Many of those need software/firmware updates to work with Lion. Check with Iomega.

Major problems using DV cam with external drive connected. HELP

I am running Final Cut Pro 5.0.4 and Quicktime Pro 7.0.4 and I want to use one of my external Firewire drives as my scratch disk, and when I connect my Canon GL2 FCP either crashes if it is open, or hangs when trying tro start uo if external hard drives are connected. As I need to use an external to capture to I really need to resolve this A.S.A.P.
Thanks in advance for your reading and replying to my post,
Sebastian

firewire external hd is a perfectly acceptable medium for capturing footage. it works pretty flawlessly and has little issues or problems
This type of blanket statement really can't be supported in my view.
There are issues with single bus firewire captures.
And many cams, including Canons, don't play well with firewire hard drives on the same bus.
Glad it works for you, but that's doesn't mean it works for everyone.
You might want to take a peak at this:
http://www.adamwilt.com/Tidbits.html#FireWireFrustrations

10.9.4 iMac hangs at desktop with external drive connected, thunderbolt or USB3.

When I boot my late 2012 27" iMac (fusion drive, 16GB) with an external drive either USB or Thunderbolt the machine hangs at the desktop, I have to disconnect the external drive and then it boots fine and seemingly works fine.
It was happening with the USB 3 drive so I thought it might be failing so I bought a new Thunderbolt G-Drive and it hangs with that too.
Any ideas greatly appreciated

Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a diagnostic test. It’s unlikely to solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
The purpose of the test is to determine whether the problem is caused by third-party software that loads automatically at startup or login, by a peripheral device, by a font conflict, or by corruption of the file system or of certain system caches.
Disconnect all wired peripherals except those needed for the test, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards, if applicable. Start up in safe mode and log in to the account with the problem. You must hold down the shift key twice: once when you turn on the computer, and again when you log in.
Note: If FileVault is enabled, or if a firmware password is set, or if the startup volume is a Fusion Drive or a software RAID, you can’t do this. Ask for further instructions.
Safe mode is much slower to start up and run than normal, with limited graphics performance, and some things won’t work at all, including sound output and Wi-Fi on certain models. The next normal startup may also be somewhat slow.
The login screen appears even if you usually login automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Test while in safe mode. Same problem?
After testing, restart as usual (not in safe mode) and verify that you still have the problem. Post the results of the test.

Imac running 10.8.2 often does not start up with firewire drives connected

I have a mid 2007 imac running osx 10.8.2 and it will nit restart with two firewire drives connected if it has been running for sometime. If i disconnecr and restart and then connect the drives and then restart again it will restart.

a brody's guess is a good one. Please also look at what Apple says in Gray screen appears during startup

Starting up from external Drive???

Have cloned my on board Drive with CCC, on a brand new JOURNALED external drive.
All went well.
Checked copied data.. it all seems fine.
Now testing the External Drive is creating a bit of anxiety as I have never attempted that before.
I know what and how to do it but am concerned that booting my computer FROM the ext.Drive, especially if slightly corrupted may cause me an issue to re-boot internally.
Also
Does updating the CLONE require as much time on follow ups, I truly hope it does NOT start all over again, just amends newly modified data...RIGHT?
I thank you for any input.

Basically all you should have to do is;
1) with external drive connected and powered on Open System Preferences->Startup Disk & select your External Drive.
2) Restart using the Restart... button.
There are things to keep in mind. The external drive must the appropriate type of Partitioning for the Mac CPU architecture that you are trying to boot (GUID Partition Table for Intel, Apple Partition Map for PPC). Up until somewhat recently Macs would only boot off of Firewire, and even then only certain Firewire chipsets. Newer Macs (I believe this includes all Intel Macs, but not sure) can boot off of Firewire or USB 2.0. I do not know about the very latest Macs, but obviously the new MacBooks won't boot off of Firewire because they do not have that interface available.
As far as I know unless you start accessing your internal drive and doing damaging changes there is little or no risk trying to boot off of your external clone. Worst case if it doesn't boot properly, power the mac down with the power button, disconnect the drive, and start up with your internal disk. If you do need to take this action make sure to go into Startup Disk and select your internal drive, otherwise your Mac spends time looking for bootable disks every time you power it on.

Blue screen on start up with external Hard drive connected

On start up Imac freezes on light blue screen with external hard drive connected via firewire. Starts okay without hard drive connected. I have repaired the drive with no resolution of the problem.

tpetrini wrote:
On start up Imac freezes on light blue screen with external hard drive connected via firewire.
You might try starting the iMac in "verbose mode" by holding down command-V when booting:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1492
That could show you some messages that might explain the problem.
Another approach is to launch the Console utility and look for messages dated around the time of a hang.

I can not store all my Music on my internal Macbook pro hard drive so I am storing it on a large external drive connected to my airport extrem. How do I get Itunes to search for the music here with out trying to copy it to my laptops hard drive??

I can not store all my Music on my internal Macbook pro hard drive so I am storing it on a large external drive connected to my airport extreme (2 TB drive plugged into the USB port). I see the drive on my laptop and I can add and delete files no problem. How do I get Itunes to search for the music here with out trying to copy it to my laptop's hard drive? I don't have enough space to do that.

How did you move the music to the external drive? What exactly is on the drive? The entire iTunes folder or only music? If it is the entire iTunes folder you can do the option+start suggestion earlier. If you copied only music and did so by dragging it there then you need to delete it again and consolidate/organize it there instead so iTunes tracks the move. iTunes 12 for Mac: Change where your iTunes files are stored - http://support.apple.com/kb/PH19507

Starting from scratch with external drive

I've just clean installed Snow Leopard after too much trouble with Lion, I've got an external drive with a load of songs which I'd like to use with iTunes but I don't want these copied to my internal drive - I'm happy to have the external drive connected for iTunes use - I've changed the iTunes media folder to the one on my external drive but it hasn't recognised the songs - what else do I need to do without ending up with duplicates of every song?.... Basically I'd simply like to use the external drive like a huge iPod!

Thanks John and Jolly,
I'm not sure what I'm doing here. I thought I did what you suggested and I tried to read that article but ...
What I have:
* Laptop with iTunes 9.0.3 running OS X 10.4.11 that has not had any prior music or other iTunes content.
* An external HD with a copy of the music from my desktop (160 GB). My desktop is also running iTunes 9 and OS X 190.4.11.
On the HD there is a folder "iTunes." That folder contains:
"Album Artwork" folder,
"Automatically Add to iTunes" folder,
"iTunes Library" file,
"iTunes Library Extras.itdb" file,
"iTunes Library Genius.itdb" file,
"iTunes Library.xml" file
"itunes music" folder,
"iTunes Music Library.xml" file,
"Previous iTunes Libraries" folder,
"Temp File.tmp" file
What I did:
* Plugged in the external so it shows up in my finder
* Launched iTunes and working through the setup was asked some sort of question like "do you want to copy files now or do it yourself later?" I clicked I'd do it myself.
* Went to iTunes / Preferences / Advanced and changed the iTunes Media folder location. It now shows "/volumes/'name of External HD'/iTunes" The "keep iTunes Media folder organized" box is checked and so is the "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library" box. I hit OK.
* Went to iTunes / File / Library / Organize Library ... and I clicked the "Consolidate files" box but not the "Upgrade to iTunes Media organization" box.
* now in iTunes I have nothing in "Music" -- a screen telling me songs and videos I add ... and there are none of my folders or playlists.
I bet I'm one click from blast off but no idea what that step might be.
Any ideas?
Thanks

Time machine has losing contact with my external drive, connected via a USB port.

Recently my Time Machine program has begun losing contact with my external drive, connected via a USB port. When I attempt to open Time Machine, it indicates there is no external hard drive. When I click on "setting up time machine" it opens airport utility. I've tried rebooting, run disk utility repairs for both hard discs, pulled and reconnected the USB cable, even completely shut down the system. Eventually the two re-establish contact, but I'm not certain what I've done that causes this. The lost contact appears to happen during the weekends. The external hard drive is a MJaxtor OneTouch 4. What should I be doing to solve this problem once and for all?

I use a little app named EasyFind - free at the App Store. It will allow you to search individual volumes or all volumes.
Download it and see if it will help.
Clinton

Can I extend time capsule by adding external drive connected TC via USB?

Hi,
I use my TC drive for backups, i's now full. Can I extend time capsule backup drive by adding external drive connected TC via USB? If yes, how do I his? I have 1TB WD external drive connected via the TC's USB, I can see the WD drive in the finder and the TC set-up...but I don't know where to go from here...
Thanks for your help
Steveru

Welcome to the discussions, Steveru!
I think what you are asking is can you simply continue Time Machine backups by adding the new USB drive, correct? The answer is not exactly. See below for details.
To use the new USB drive for Time Machine backups, you'll need to Open System Preferences (gear icon) on the dock and open Time Machine. Click on Select Disk and click your USB drive to highlight it, then click Use for Backup. Here's the rub....Time Machine will make a new full complete backup of everything on your Mac's hard drive. There's no way to avoid this. After that, it will continue to make scheduled incremental backups just like it did before on the Time Capsule.
If you ever need to go back to your original backups on the Time Capsule, you'll need to right-click the Time Capsule icon on the dock and choose Browse Other Time Machine Disks.
When the USB drive start to fill, you may decide that you no longer need all the old backups on the Time Capsule disk since you should have a good history of backups on the USB drive at that point.
So, you could erase the Time Capsule disk and then start backing up to the Time Capsule disk again. At that time, it will also make a complete backup on the first pass and then normal incremental backups from that point forward. When the TC begins to fill again, then you could erase the older backups on the USB drive and start backups again on that drive. Then switch to the other drive in the future to keep things going indefinitely. If you go with this type of flip flop plan, you should always have a solid history of many months of backups at any given time.
Will a plan like this work? I don't answer a question on the forum unless I've done it myself. This has been working well for me for almost 3 years.
Pondini, the resident expert on Time Machine and Time Capsule affairs, may have some comments on this as well. If you haven't already seen his excellent guide, Using Time Machine with a Time Capsule or +Time Machine FAQ+, these are the best available sources of information on this subject on the Internet.
Or, if you don't want to erase any your backups, you could of course keep adding a new USB drive when the current drive is about to fill.

Problem mapping USB external drive connected to Airport Extreme on my PC

I am having a problem mapping my USB external drive in my PC running WIndows Vista. Here is what I have so far:
USB External Drive connected to my AirPort Extreme which is connected to my Century Link modem/router.
I have installed the USB drive using the Airport Utility. In the Disks section the Enable File Sharing is checked, Secure Shared Disks is set to With a Disk Password, I have entered the password in the next 2 rows, and finally AirPort Disks Gues Access is set to Not Allowed. The section below named These Settings Configure Windows File Sharing is empty. Am I supposed to put something here?
I was also told I need to map the drive in my PC, but when I go to do that via the Computer and the Map Network Drive, I get stuck where it asks me to enter a folder name. I read many of the posts which tell me I need to enter among other things the disk's ip address, but I am unable to find it anywhere. Where do I find what to put here?
Can someone please help this frustrated user?

I had my USB drive on my APE working with Time Machine under 10.5.1 very reliably. A few days ago however, I needed to suspend a backup operation, and when I came back to restart it, time machine refused to mount the disk image on the drive. After several attempts to get it to connect with no luck I decided to delete the image (the sparce image file) and start over. Now TM refuses to create a new image.
BTW, on the Mac OSX hints site there have been suggestions to start a backup with the drive directly connected, then stop the backup, move the sparce image file to the root of the drive, reconnect the drive to the APE base station to get it working. I tried this again, but I think Apple has changed something in 10.5.2, because when directly connected TM no longer creates a sparce image file.
Anybody else seen this behavior after upgrading to 10.5.2?

IMac Slow Boot/Start up with firewire disk connected

I have recently purchased a a WD FreeAgent 1Tb external disk, to use as a Time Machine drive.
Since connecting this drive, the boot time has increased from less than a minute to nearly 5 mins.
I presume my iMac is doing some kind of check of this drive, and because its 1TB it is taking an age. Is there anyway to get my computer to ignore this disk on start up?
Is this a problem with Leopard? IS it resolved in snow leopard.
I have read some posts that suggest unplugging the drive on each start up, is this really what i have to do?, as its a bit of a pain.

It is not a general problem with Leopard. I have a 750GB drive that is used for Time Machine (via USB 2.0), a FireWire external drive, up to three iPods (FireWire and USB), and sometimes a smaller emergency/maintenance startup external drive connected during startup, and the startup time is not noticeably affected based on what is or is not connected.
Can you explain which part of the startup sequence is being delayed. Is the screen still grey? Has the Apple logo appeared with the spinning wheel? Has the screen turned blue? Is it that last part, when the Desktop is being assembled on the screen?
Have you reset PRAM?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
Have you run Disk Utility and used +Repair Disk Permissions+ on your startup volume recently.
Since the issue seems to be related to this 1TB drive, have you run Disk Utility and used +Repair Disk+ on that drive, to check for disk directory or disk data corruption errors? Time Machine does some complex file management, so such errors are quite possible, and that may be the cause of the delay during startup.

How can I keep Time Machine from Automatically backing up any external drive connected

Problem: Whenever I have an external drive attached and TimeMachine starts, it tries to back-up the drive. Usually, this causes Time Machine to gut my TimeMachine back-ups to try and make room before saying, not enough space to complete the back-up. NOT Helpful! I maintain offline/offsite clones of my drives but I also receive drives with large amounts of data which I will want backed up AFTER I have copied it to my drives. Yes, I can go into TimeMachine and exclude the drive(s). If I forget to do that, then BYE BYE back-ups.
Ideally, I would like a prompt asking if I want to include the drive in theTimeMachine back-up after I connect it. Anyone know how to set this?
or
I would be fine with simply having TimeMachine treat all drives unknown to the backup as drives to be ignored.
Thoughts?

perranegra wrote:
It worked beautifully before and would update only when I plugged the firewire drive in and also if I left it over 10 days it would remind me to back up the computer.
Right, the behavior hasn't changed between SL and Lion.
I would have liked the option to set times / days when I wanted.
SL didn't have this, any more than Lion does.
Also now I have a greyed out icon with a warning sign and clicking on the preferences it helpfully tells me the last back up has failed.
Because it DID.
I am usually happy with the updates and tweaks but this is one I am not happy and would appreciate a solution or at least a work around.... and no I don't like having the default to Time Machine as off!
Time Machine hasn't significantly changed between SL and Lion. Well, other than the local HD backup sets when a portable device is away from the actual backup destination, which really seem to freak people out for some reason.

Unable to view folders of a usb external drive connected to AEBS

My Macbook can see the External Drive connected to AEBS but unable to browse the folders. When I click the external drive to view the folders the beach ball remain spinning for a long time and then gives an error unable to connect. My MacBook Pro can see all the external drive files with no problem.

How is that drive formatted? It needs to be Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or FAT32 for the AirPort Extreme to be able to read the disk correctly.
In most cases, you will also need to use a powered USB hub with the AirPort Extreme....even if the hard drive has its own power supply since the USB port on the AirPort Extreme is under powered.
My MacBook Pro can see all the external drive files with no problem.
Your Mac can read more types of drives than the AirPort Extreme.

Start up with external Drive connected and switched on

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