Booting from external disk drive

[davsch]

Greetings.

I used SuperDuper! to copy my Mac Mini internal hard drive (PPC G4) onto my external fire wire drive (Lacie d2 Extreme 160 GB) and designated the external drive as my startup disk. OS X boots fine from the external drive, but I can't get past the log in screen. The system doesn't recognize my user name and/or password, so I have had to restart and boot from the Mini. I have the Mini configured to automoatically log in to my account upon restart, but apparently this setting didn't transfer to the external drive. Also, The log in screen that appears when I boot from the external drive is different from the one that appears when I boot from the Mini. The latter screen has user photos and requests only the user password, whereas the screen that appears when I boot from the external drive has no photos and requests both user name and password.

I don't whether this is relevant to the problem, but I didn't create a new partition on my external drive for the cloned disk; I just copied it onto the already formatted, single partition external drive.

Any ideas?

Many thanks.

David

[dnanian]

That's a bit weird, David. If you turn "Auto log in" off, and then use Smart Update to update the copy, does it work properly?

This almost sounds like a startup item (AntiVirus, Norton, etc) might be having some trouble starting properly...

[davsch]

According to the info SuperDuper! provides, Smart Update mimics an "Erase then Copy" command. I have files on the external drive that are not backed up on the Mini and that I don't want to lose. Will running Smart Update erase them? When I originally cloned the Mini's hard disk I chose the "Copy newer files . ." option of the Backup all files script.

BTW, before purchasing SuperDuper! I tried to clone the disk using Carbon Copy Cloner and encountered the same problem: The external drive booted OS X but I couldn;t get past the log in screen. I'm not running any anticirus applications automatically on startup.

Cheers,

David

[dnanian]

Yes, Smart Update will definitely erase files on the destination that aren't on the source... and you can't really guarantee bootability if you use "Copy Newer" (as mentioned in the User's Guide).

You really should partition the external into data and backup partitions. That way, you can dedicate one to your bootable backup, and one to your storage needs, and manage both appropriately...

[davsch]

I bit the bullet, backed everything up (sigh) and did it the right way. Everything works fine now.

Cheers,

David

[dnanian]

Good, David -- one time process: I think you'll be a happier camper now.