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Old 12-09-2006, 04:19 PM
Staxman Staxman is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Seattle, WA: the belly of the beast!
Posts: 15
Boot from FireWire HD

This morning I started SD copying my entire HD to a FireWire HD, told SD to boot from the FW HD when finished, and went out to breakfast. (This was in preparation for upgrading from Jaguar to Tiger.) When I got back I had just a pale-gray screen. I did some experimenting, with the following results:

1) Hands off keyboard while booting up: Pale gray screen, no Apple logo, nothing.

2) Hold down Option key while booting: I have a post somewhere from an OSX listserv that says this should enable me to choose my boot disk. What came up was something that looked like Classic, with a couple of icons. The one on the left showed a clockwise-pointing circular arrow, and the one on the right showed a right-pointing arrow. Maybe this was on the way to working, but after a few minutes of seeing the wristwatch icon, I ran out of patience and rebooted.

3) Hold down Command key while booting: This resulted in the computer booting up just fine. When I went into System Preferences, I saw that apparently SD had set preferences to boot from the FW HD, as I'd asked it to. I booted once more, just to make sure, reset preferences to boot from the internal HD, and booted again.

Am I right in thinking that this shows that the FW HD is bootable? I don't really mind holding down the Cmd key to boot, but it was my understanding that this shouldn't be necessary. What would have happened holding down the Option key if I'd waited longer? In 4 years of Mac ownership, this is my first time booting from anything except the local HD, so I definitely don't claim to know it all! Thanks.
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