Starting a 10.6 MacBook from external drive

I'm trying to run disk utility on a 10.6 macBook ...
I also have a MacPro desktop running 10.8.2
I am guessing I should make a startup disk on an external USB drive -
does anyone have a suggestion as to the best way to do that, if I want to start the 10.6 MacBook from an external drive, then run disk utility on the MacBook hard drive from the external?
thanks!
w

Erase and Install Snow Leopard
1. 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.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. When formatting is complete quit DU and return to the installer. Install a lean as possible Snow Leopard system (no extra languages, fonts, no Rosetta and no X11.)
When done you have a bootable flash drive that has Disk Utility installed. There should even be space left for third-party tools like Disk Warrior.

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My admin password stopped working. Can't restart in recovery and tried terminal but need more specific guidance there. Am operating macbook from external drive

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Hey JustSomeGuy,
Thanks for the response. It is the external drive that has the data I need to keep. Reboot did not do it...
What I did get done just now is going into Safe Mode and delete the problematic files there and Empty Trash. That worked - so one step closer hopefully. I did not do the .DS Store files (will do that after done writing this).
How do I do a copy with cp rather than the finder?
Repair permissions is grayed out in DiskUtil - I did do a Disk Repair in Safe Mode and that turned up without error. However, now back in normal mode - Disk Repair gives an error again saying that the drive cannot be unmounted.
Thanks for the help so far.
Cheers

Transfer files to MacBook from external drives & MacPro without FireWire

I just realized my Macbook (13 inch aluminum) doesn't have a FireWire port. WHY? I can't believe I didn't notice when I bought the thing. I assumed that a FireWrire port was standard like USB. I know that I can transfer files from my MacPro Desktop using migration assistant. However, it doesn't let me pick and choose which files to transfer. Is the best plan to transfer everything all at once and then delete what I don't want from the MacBook? I've also got a lot of individual files & folders on external FireWire drives that I'd like to copy to my MacBook. Is there a way to hook up an external FireWire hard drive to my MacBook? Are there FireWire to USB adapters? Am I going to have to transfer these files via USB memory sticks, CD-R's & DVD-R's? Or maybe it would be a better idea to dump them on my MacPro, use Migration assistant to copy it all at once and then pick and choose what to keep on my MacBook.
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I assumed that a FireWrire port was standard like USB.
It is, just not on the aluminum Macbook.
It can be done with USB, but it is slower and less reliable.
The hard drive is fairly easy to remove on the aluminum Macbook. I would remove it and install it in an external Firewire enclosure temporarily to transfer your files quickly and reliably, then put the drive back in the Macbook.
Firewire allows two operating modes. One is asynchronous, like USB which suffers from latency, bus contention and collisions.
The other is isochronous mode, and it lets a device carve out a certain dedicated amount of bandwidth that other devices can't touch. It gets a certain number of time slices each second all its own. The advantages for audio/video should be obvious: that stream of data can just keep on flowing, and as long as there isn't more bandwidth demand than the wire can handle, nothing will interfere with it. No collisions, no glitches.

How do I stop LR5 import dialogue from starting every time I insert an external drive. I have already unchecked this from Preferences to no avail.

How do I stop LR5 import dialogue from starting every time I insert an external drive. I have already unchecked this from Preferences to no avail.

Hi Jim:
You are a Legend! I have Windows 8.1, but I had the same option in Control Panel and sure enough it was in auto play, which I have now changed and it is no longer occurring. Thank you!!
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Broken in Logic 9?: Reindex loops from external drive

Adding loops from an external drive in Logic 9 does not seem to work any longer. It used to work great in L8. Anyone have similar experiences? Know any work arounds? Is it a bug? If it's a bug I'll file it with Apple.
Previously in Logic 8 it was easy to reindex loops on an external drive:
(1) Delete the loop indexes from root/Library/Audio/Apple Loops Index
(2) Use Finder to locate the loops on the external
(3) Drag the loop folders into the L8 media browser.
(4) L8 asks if you want to copy the loops or use them from their present location. Select present location intsead of copy locally.
(5) L8 takes 5-20 minutes to build index of loops from external drive
I have tried this procedure several times in L9 without success. Instead I get the following:
(1) Delete the loop indexes from root/Library/Audio/Apple Loops
(2) Use Finder to locate the loops on the external
(3) Drag the loop folders into the L8 media browser.
(4) L9 ask for my admin password.
(5) Enter my password
(6) I'm NOT asked if I want to copy loops locally or use them in their present location. Instead a reindex progress dialog comes up for 2 seconds then goes away.
(7) In the end nothing happened. No loops copied, indexed, or anything
There is only one way I managed to get loops into L9 but it is exactly what I'm NOT looking for:
(1) In the folder with all my loops spotlight search ".CAF" (In this case want to reindex Apple content which is all CAF)
(2) Make sure to click "show more" at the bottom of the search results.
(3) Drag the search results to the loop browser.
(4) L9 indexes them all right, AND also copies them to my user library! All 30 GBs worth. Definitely not what I want.
In the end, I had to reinstall the Loops from the DVDs and specify an external location for them. (This whole mess got started when I tried to move the GarageBand and iLife loops to an external drive. The installer does not let you specify a location for them.)
Just so you know I've done some homework:
I've scoured other Logic forums and found these relevant threads that in the end did not solve the issue. They mostly seem to refer to Logic 8 which does not have this issue.
@ LUG
Thread 1
@ Logic Pro Help
Thread 1
Thread 2
Thread 3 this fellow seems to have a similar problem as I. He drags folders into the loop browser but nothing happens.
@ Apple Discussions
Thread 1
Thread 2

I just installed LP9 and all my loops and samples are on external drives. The drag and drop onto the browser method worked fine and I WAS given the option to move the files or not. The only exception to the above is Ultrabeat samples. They seem to want to be on the System drive.
RW

Problems booting from external drives

Ever since I got this 6-core 2013 MacPro (January 2015), I have had strange problems and glitches, but for this posting, I am talking about problems being able to boot up from external drives. I took the 4 external drives out of my old 2009 MacPro and put them into a 4-bay Thunderbolt enclosure. This enclosure can be configured as a RAID if all drives are the same (which they are not) or it can just be a place to be able to access all 4 drives. I used to be able to boot from each of those drives on the older MacPro but I am unable to do so now. They show up in the System Preferences/Startup Disk but if I choose one, it just reboots into the new MacPro drive. I even tried pulling out a couple of the drives and mounting each into a USB 3.0 (Sabrent) dock and still I could not boot from those drives which have the latest version of Yosemite. Yes, they are formatted correctly. I used to boot from them. I was able to clone one of the drives to a Seagate USB 3.0 hard drive and boot from that. Although, the clone was not perfect. It didn't transfer all my settings so I could recover some logins and serial numbers I wanted that I have never been able to retrieve since I got this new Mac.
Yesterday, I formatted a 32GB flash drive and tried to install Yosemite on it. I planned to put DiskWarrior on it. When I started to install Yosemite (from a saved download) it let me choose that drive, but when it restarted before installing, I was right back where I started on my MacPro's hard drive.
Is this normal behavior for the 2013 MacPro? Or is it just mine? I am beginning to think I may have a lemon since I have had other strange problems that don't go away.

Not all external devices are bootable. First stop would be involve whoever handles the 4-bay Thunderbolt. Seeing how it has a bridge most likely in order to support RAID mode that may not have the correct frmware or other reasons.
https://bombich.com/kb/ccc4
https://bombich.com/kb/ccc4/search/bootable%20volume
CCC is the only program I would be using.

Can Disk Utility get SMART status from external drives?

I recently updated my backup plan with a NewerTech quad-interface dock and a WD Caviar Green hd. I'm using the FW800 interface to connect to my iMac (10.6.7) Everything works perfectly, as expected. I noticed, though, that Disk Utility cannot report the SMART status on the new WD drive. DU simply says "Not Supported" under SMART Status.
Is Disk Utility telling me that it doesn't read SMART status from external drives? Or is it telling me that the new drive doesn't support SMART (which I would find highly unusual)? And, if it's Disk Utility that can't read the status, are there any third-party apps that can report the SMART status on an external drive?
Thanks,
JimC

Unfortunately I cannot speak to the NewerTech enclosure, but in principle it appears to be possible to have SMART information displayed even for external drives if the enclosure's bridge controller chip allows it.
My experience:
I've used two MacPower Pleiades FW800/400/USB/eSATA enclosures for several years and I've now supplemented them with two additional inXtron enclosures. They all work as expected daisy-chained to the iMac.
The interesting thing is that the inXtron enclosures came with a CD with some software on it ("Smart AP") which is not available for download, notably a Dashboard Widget for displaying actual and maximum temperatures, total hours of operation, start/stop cycles, drive model and serial number.
This widget is complete garbage, though – it is a nauseating nightmare of extreme over-design at the expense of even basic usability:
http://www.inxtron.com/information-center/smart-ap-for-external-hard-drives
To make matters even worse, it can only display the above information for the first external drive connected.
BUT: This Widget internally calls a command line utility which does the actual parameter retrieval, and that one can be called from the terminal as well.
So after installing the software from CD and effectively discarding the Widget, I checked out the command line utility in the Terminal and found that this utility actually reported data about ALL my enclosures, both the inXtron and the MacPower ones (there seems to be firmware compatibility across these):
(The '$' is supposed to be Terminal's bash prompt – type in only the rest of the respective line.)
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 1
29 50 13 8
53 67 645 15829
52 53 90 7105
51 52 18 13
Each line reports the following for one connected enclosure:
[temp] [maxtemp] [cycles] [hours]
The drives are reported first USB, then FireWire drives, each in the order of first connection / mounting.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 2
WD-WCA**************
WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0
5TE09***************
ST31000333AS-00MMMB0
5TE09***************
ST31000333AS-00MMMB0
WD-WMA**************
WDC WD30EZRS-00J99B0
Each drive gets two lines reported, first the drive's serial number ("***" blocking out my exact ones), then the drive model.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 3
29 50 13 8
WD-WCA**************
WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0
53 67 645 15829
5TE09***************
ST31000333AS-00MMMB0
52 53 90 7105
5TE09***************
ST31000333AS-00MMMB0
51 52 18 13
WD-WMA**************
WDC WD30EZRS-00J99B0
This combines both of the above.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 5
disk4
disk1
disk2
disk3
This reports the mounted disk names (referring not to the volume names but to the internal Unix names as in /dev/[drive]); Numbering is in connection / mounting order, the actual sequence is as always USB drives, then FireWire drives.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 6
USB
1394
1394
1394
This reports the connection interface for each drive in the same sequence as all other commands.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 7
MPT934DS1.20.0104.00
MPT934DS1.20.0104.00
This might report the firmware revision or something like that.
These are the commands I know about, and they apply only to the "Smart AP" software supplied with current inXtron enclosures, but it may be possible that other brands use it as well.
I have not been able to identify information about the self-test (early(?) failure warning), but it might be contained as well in the data reported above.
As always, your mileage may vary and you should never do such experiments without FIRST making sure you've got backups of your data and that such backup is not connected during experimentation!
Maybe this can help some people getting the information they need; And maybe there are similar capabilities with other enclosures. At the very least it demonstrates that with the proper firmware in the enclosures themselves and some software on the Mac it IS possible to get at least some of the SMART information from the drive in an external FireWire- or USB-connected enclosure.
None of that is fed into the system's "official" SMART mechanism, though, so no luck using standard mechanisms or applications for it. It's strictly a command-line affair (deservedly disregarding the mishappen Widget).
Good luck!

Why won't photos from external drive stay on my computer (iPhoto) once I disconnect the external drive?

I'm trying to move photos from my external drive to my new computer. When I connect the external drive, I'm able to view all the photos in iPhoto, and I'm able to drag photos to a desktop folder and/or directly into iPhoto. But, when I disconnect the external drive, I no longer have access to the photos on my computer. I'm sure there's a step I may be overlooking but I'm using the same process I've used in the past and cannot determine next steps.

Thanks so far.
I'm currently working on a 2012 MacBook Air 13", running OSX 10.8.
Upon opening my external drive, I've dragged the iPhoto Library to my computer's desktop. When I've opened iPhoto and tried to import the library (from external drive and/or from the desktop), I'm unable to do so, i.e., the library is not highlighted (it won't allow me to click on it).
I can open and view the library from my external drive in iPhoto when the external drive is connected to the computer. But, once the external drive is disconnected from the computer, I'm unable to view the library
I've tried all of the aforementioned when the "Copy Imported Item(s) to the iPhoto Library" is checked.

My Mac crashed. I got a new hard drive. I reinstalled Lightroom. Fortunately ircats are stored on an external drive. How do I import all of the old catalogues from external drive into a new LR catalogue. I have done it before. It has just been many years

My Mac crashed. I got a new hard drive. I reinstalled Lightroom. Fortunately ircats are stored on an external drive. How do I import all of the old catalogues from external drive into a new LR catalogue. I have done it before. It has just been many years and I can't recall how.

If you had stored your catalog files on an external drive, then all you have to do is double-click on them to open them and use them.
Or you could move them to the internal drive and double-click on them once the move is completed.
To create a single catalog file from multiple ones, you could use File->Import from Another Catalog

Since you can no longer backup to disk, how to restore from external drive without losing all ratings and playlists

since you can no longer backup to disk, how to restore from external drive without losing all ratings and playlists?

My own opinion is that you should install the later appropriate version of Silverkeeper. That said, I would in fact recommend if you can wait a few days for an answer, that you email the La Cie Silverkeeper backup team via the email link on the site at http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/
They are careful to say they are not officially providing a backup service, but when I emailed them with a query regarding usage about a year ago after downloading Silverkeeper for myself, I got a reply within a couple of days that cleared up my question.

How do I tell itunes (on a Windows XP PC) to start adding downloaded files to an external drive ? Starting itunes while pressing the shift key and then choosing works only for a MAC, I think. I only need this one final step. All is copied already

How do I tell itunes on a Windows XP PC to start downloading new songs to my external drive ? The whole library has already been moved. I am just one final step away. Everything I`m downloading still lands on C: Relaunching itunes while pressing "shift" and then getting prompted to choose library might work for a Mac, it doesn't for Windows.

In iTunes click on 'Edit', then 'Preferances', Click on the 'Advanced' button, change the entry in the 'iTunes media folder location' to point to your external drive.

Can't read iPhoto library from external drive

I suddenly can't can't read iPhoto library from external drive. I have talked to WD and nohing is wrong with the network drive. I can open images and files from it. But, I can't read in iPhoto Library.

Network Drive? a NAS?
iPhoto needs to have the Library sitting on disk formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Users with the Library sitting on disks otherwise formatted regularly report issues including, but not limited to, importing, exporting, saving edits and sharing the photos.
Basically, you need to move the library to a correctly formatted disk.

External Drive with Time Machine, booting from external drive with utilitie

I'm using Time Machine now with
a LaCie 1TB external hard drive.
Everything works fine.
But, I've been wondering:
Can I place a program like TechTool
on the external drive (that Time Machine uses)
and boot from that external drive.
I would like to be able to do that,
because diagnostics and repair programs
only works properly and fully when they run from
external drives. Anything on the internal drive can be repaired
and examine. Impossible to do if Techtool is on the same
drive that's been examined.
Any thoughts as to what I should do?
Thanks
iMac, Leopard, Time Machine, Lacie Quadra 1TB drive.
P.S. Stupid question: If my computer crashes, and I reboot from Time Machine
(from the external drive) how does the computer know which backup to take ?!?
Isn't there many versions of the OS on the Time Machine backup taken at different times?

pitou wrote:
P.S. Stupid question: If my computer crashes, and I reboot from Time Machine
(from the external drive) how does the computer know which backup to take ?!?
Isn't there many versions of the OS on the Time Machine backup taken at different times?
As V.K. says, you can't boot from TM backups.
But you can restore your entire system from any one of them, per the procedure in #14 of the Frequently Asked Questions *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
You can also selectively restore from them, while running normally. See #15 in the FAQ Tip.
You might want to review these:
Time Machine Tutorial
Time Machine 101
How to back up and restore your files
Time Machine Features
Apple - Support - Mac OSX v10.5 Leopard Time Machine
and perhaps browse the rest of the FAQ Tip.

I just had a new hard drive installed. After loading everything back on my computer from external drive, i came to the "select wireless network screen. I've misplaced the WEP password for my internet. Is there anyway to find it on another computer?

i just had a new hard drive installed. After loading everything back on my computer from external drive, i came to the "select wireless network screen. I've misplaced the WEP password for my internet. Is there anyway to find it on another computer?

Maybe. What kind of other computer are you talking about? What operating system is it running? What kind of wireless router are you using?
Your best bet may be to just reset the router and set it up again.
Just so you know, WEP is a very old security system for wireless and is considered insecure. If you have it available, use WPA2.

Best method of importing from external drive?

I have a 1T LaCie and want to know the best method to get those images into LR. The defaults are: "Add" and "NewPhotos" to "MyCatalog"
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Thanks in advance,
Mr Mayor

Duplicate thread, see Best method to import from external drive?

Starting a 10.6 MacBook from external drive

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