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#1
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Booting from a USB drive
The FAQ seems to suggest that PPC Macs can't boot from a USB interface, however, I just came across this article:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...61017084322177 Does anyone have any experience with booting from an external USB drive, and if so is it on a PPC or Intel Mac? |
#2
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Tried a USB boot on Intel...
Quote:
My drive shows up (SmartDisk FireLite USB2) in the Startup Disk control pane, and I select it, but after a few seconds of what looks like a successful boot, it goes into command-line or single-user mode. I partitioned as a GUID and cloned the drive using SD! Have to spend more time on it later, but so far, no luck. Scott |
#3
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You know, PPC Macs can't really boot from USB. Macs with USB*1* ports *might* be able to start up from USB, but very slowly. USB2 Macs that are PPC based can't: I think people are misinterpreting what they're seeing...
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--Dave Nanian |
#4
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I found the following interesting anomaly when attempting to boot from my USB 2.0 Western Digital "My Book" drive. First I tried to make a clone of my Mac's drive using RsyncX. While it appears that the synchronization process was successful, I found I was not able to boot from the remote drive as I expected (it's well known that booting from an external USB drive isn't supported on Macs). I then tried, as the comment suggested, making my backup clone with SuperDuper!. Somehow, my Mac was actually able to boot off the USB 2.0 drive using the backup clone made by SuperDuper!. |
#5
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I know -- I've seen that. It's possible that late-stage Open Firmware changes were made to support that configuration, but I cannot reproduce it on a number of USB2 PPC Powerbooks I have here. And my communications with Apple -- and knowledge base articles at Apple -- indicate that it won't work.
But, even if true in some limited circumstances, USB2 drives are much worse than FireWire drives. They're slower, deal less well with other devices on the bus, don't provide as much current on the port... avoid if possible!
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--Dave Nanian |
#6
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So, how do I make these USB 2 drives boot an Intel Mac?
Haven't had any luck cloning my Mini to a USB 2 drive. Dave? I know you know |
#7
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Just partition them as GUID, back up, and boot from them. No real trick...
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--Dave Nanian |
#8
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Quote:
Very interesting. |
#9
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Hi everybody,
My name is Enrique Diaz (Diazruanova) and I am new to this forum I would like to say that so far, booting from a USB external disk by creating a SandBox partition, has been a straightforward operation so far! No problems whatsoever besides a Restart time much longer than that from booting with the original internal drive on my iMac Intel Core 2. Also i have NOT noticed a perceived delay in opening and working with apps compared to booting with the Mac HD, but I have been working like this just a few hours since the first SandBox restart. I will post here again if I encounter something odd.
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Diazruanova Last edited by Diazruanova; 11-17-2006 at 09:24 PM. |
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