Using External Hard Drive as My Startup Disk

I have created a Clone of my main drive on an external USB drive.
I would like to use this as an emergency backup.
However when I plug in the drive it does not appear in my Startup Disk in my preferences window.
What am I doing wrong?
Sorry if this is a dumb question!
Thanks,
Steve

PPC Macs cannot boot from USB drives. Their startup drives use Apple Partition Map formatting.
Intel Macs use GUID. They can startup from an APM formatted drive however, as that is the format of the Mac OS X Installer discs. But, you cannot install OS X onto an APM formatted drive from an Intel Mac.

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OK, it's very bad computing to use a backup disk for anything but a backup. The reason being is if/when the HD crashes you will have lost not only all your backup but the data files. While I commend you for wanting redundant backup, you really need separate EHDs for doing so. Format each EHD using Disk Utility to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using the GUID parttition. When you connect, OS X will ask if you want to use that drive as a Time Machine backup drive, select yes and then let it backup. On the second EHD format the same way however do not use TM as a backup, this time I'd suggest an app such as SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a clone of the internal HD. Leave both EHDs connected and TM will backup new or changed files automatically on a hourly basis. The clone you will need to set to backup on the schedule you want. For example I have my SuperDuper EHD set to backup only changed or updated files at 2AM every day.
The advantage of a clone is that if the computers internal HD crashes you can boot from a clone and continue working, TM will not do that but it's great for keeping an archive of all files. So if you want a version of a file from many months ago, TM will help you locate and restore it.

My final cut is running extremely slow after having for 6 months. I use external hard drives and save nothing on my computer. it takes a long time to render now. do you think something is wrong with computer. took it to mac store but they fail to help

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What did Apple tell you about what they did (or did not) find here?
See if working on the main disk is any faster.
USB2 is glacial, as I/O interconnects go. And USB2 disks have been known to fail, or sometimes to drop back to USB1 speeds, too. FireWire 800 is substantially faster than USB2, but still not as fast as the internal drive connections can provide.
Put another way, start varying your configuration, and see which configuration changes (still) have the problem, and which don't.

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To use Disk Utilities, attach the drive, open Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utilities and then highlight the LaCie drive in the left panel of the DU window. In the right panel, choose the Partition button top center of the pane. Then decide how many partitions you want on the drive, one is just fine.
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Then choose the partition table, the default is GUID which is prefered.
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Hi!
My eMac's 80 gig hard drive is full - mainly due to music, movies and photos - so it is slow and I can't add new media. I cloned the whole hard drive to a 1TB external drive. The computer boots from the external drive. The hard drive is connected to the computer via a FireWire 800 to Firewire 400 adapter cable. I am running Leopard. My RAM is maxed out.
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Your Mac will run best and fastest if you run from the internal HD -- it's much faster than an external HD.
And it's best to keep at least 15% free on it; as your startup drive gets more full, your Mac will slow down. Just how much and when depends on a lot of things, but if it gets over 95% or so, it may get very sluggish, apps may hang or crash, data may be corrupted or lost, etc.
So your best bet would be a larger HD in your Mac. I don't know if that's possible or how much it would cost.
Second best would be to put selected data on an external HD, preferably not the one you use for Time Machine. As long as you format that HD for a Mac, Time Machine can back it up, along with your internal HD.
Put Music on the external for sure, and things like documents.
Photos and Video, maybe. Editing will be much slower on a F/W disk than your internal. So it might make sense to do editing on the internal, then put completed video on the external. You'll have to figure that out depending on what you're doing and how.
For help moving things, see:
[Moving your iTunes Music folder|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449]
[Moving your iPhoto library|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1229]
[Moving iMovie footage to another drive|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1026]

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Yes, but you need to have the external drive on and mounted when starting iTunes. You can add the external HD to your log in items list in System Preferences -> Accounts to handle this.
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Apple explains how to use Time Machine in http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427.
Setting up and using TM is very simple to do, connect any external HD (format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using Disk Utility ) and your computer shoudl ask if you want to use that EHD for a Time Machine backup. If you have any questions visit your local Apple Store or reseller and they can answer how to setup and use TM and also should be able to offer suggestions on EHDs. My personal preference is OWC (www.macsales.com) Mercury Elite Pro due to the build quality and OWC's level of support.

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Hi all,
I have had a good look through previous discussions and I can't seem to find an issue relevant to mine.
My external hard drive has 2 partitions (1 time machine back up, 1 general hard drive). The issue is that the HD is running when it is plugged in however it is not visible in either disk utility or finder.
I am running OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) on a 2010 MacBook Pro. I also have parallels desktop running windows 7. When I boot windows and plug in the HD I usually get the option to mount the HD to either OS X or Windows. With this issue the option window appears for a split second (not enough time to select either) and then disappears. It seems that the HD may be ejecting itself as soon as it is registered by the computer. I have tried using a different power cable for the HD and also a different usb cable, this doesn't help.
The external HD is a Samsung D3 Station, which i have had for 6 months now and never had an issue with.
Any help is appreciated
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An update for anyone who can help me:
I have tried the external hard drive in other computers (mac and windows), each time I get the same problem above.
I have removed the HD from the enclosure and purchased a docking station for it (3.5" SATA). When I plug it in to the laptop it disconnects itself straight away before it is visible. With the windows computers it installs the drivers and says that the device is ready to use, then disconnects before it shows up.
As the HD is not visible there is no option to re-format or anything.
This is very frustrating as I was using the HD with no issues and it randomly disconnected and I have not been able to access since.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Bruce

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Hi,
I'm not sure if this is in the right place, so apologies in advance if not. I've looked around the internet for a good while now, and I haven't found anyone in my exact position.
My PC's hard drive (running Windows 7) recently died; long story short, I am attempting to reinstall windows. The only other computer I have is this MacBook Pro, on which I have an .iso file of Windows 7. So I want to use my external hard drive (WD 500GB "MyBook") as a boot device so that I can install Windows onto my new internal hard drive.
The problem I am having is that, well, nothing seems to be working. Every time I try to load the .iso onto my external hard drive and boot my PC with it, either a blank screen appears or it says "missing operating system".
I have made sure that the BIOS is running the external hard drive as its boot priority.
I have tried using Disk Utility to partition the external drive, then using 'Restore' to load the .iso onto the partition, to no avail.
I have tried simply dropping the extracted .iso files onto the hard drive, this doesn't work.
I have also tried changing the file system of the external hard drive using the 'Erase' feature (NTFS-3G (using an addon), FAT32, exFAT, all of the others), but I notice that whenever I use Restore after doing this, the file system seems to return to Mac OS Extended, which might be why it isn't booting up on my PC. Is there any way I can succesfully partition the external hard drive in a format that will allow Windows 7 to boot (such as NTFS?), and is Disk Utility even the right program to do this?
If you want any more information from me, please let me know and I'll do my best to provide it - I'm not the most advanced mac user in the world, but I've spent days trying to fix this problem and nothing, no combination of anything, seems to work at all. So any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

Here is a quick suggestion for you:
Download Virtual Box (free PC Emulator for Mac) and install Windows 7 on your Mac (don't worry about activating it yet, as you don't need to keep it more than a few hours). You can tell Virtual Box to use the ISO file as the DVD drive for your virtual Windows computer, so no need to burn a disk.
Search Google for creating a bootable USB installer for Windows 7. I found a link that gave good instructions on how to do this using DiskPart.
Follow the instructions to make the bootable USB stick for installing Windows 7 using your virtual machine you created above.
Use the USB stick to install Windows on your new PC.
Remove the virtual Windows machine from your Mac.
Remove Virtual Box from your Mac.
I found a set of instructions and built an installable USB stick last night that worked great for installing Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) onto my older ThinkPad I had sitting at home. The USB installer also installs in about half the time as a DVD install. The only reason I have you create the virtual Windows PC is that all of the instructions for makeing the Windows install USB stick are written assuming that you already have access to a running Windows PC. By doing this install, you have up to 3 days before you would need to activate it and you can build the installer USB stick and remove teh virtual computer long before that.

Using External Hard Drive as My Startup Disk

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