Firewire booting?

[mrpixel]

I have made several clones of my main system with SuperDuper - 100Gs of data so they take about three hours each. Two onto two partitions on an external Maxtor One Touch and one onto a external LaCie (Porsche Design). Before attempting to install Leopard on these clones, I tried to see if they would boot into the cloned 10.4.10. None of them would! SuperDuper is set to make the drives bootable but I get an endless grey screen at startup, eventually the fans begin to race and I have to switch off.

I saw the note about formatting the LaCies without journalling but it makes no difference.

Are there any other tricks?

(Mac G5 Dual 2Ghz (2004)).

[dnanian]

That's strange. When you try to boot, how many drives are attached?

[mrpixel]

Originally Posted by dnanian

That's strange. When you try to boot, how many drives are attached?

Only one external drive at a time. I don't daisy chain them.

The clone I made onto a LaCie Porsche Design on my Intel Mac Mini works as expected, it is the PPC G5 they won't work with.

[dnanian]

Are you trying to boot the Intel image from the G5s?

[mrpixel]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Are you trying to boot the Intel image from the G5s?

No. They are completely separate systems. I haven't needed to boot from an external Firewire drive before, I assumed that it would work. I've ordered a bigger internal to take Firewire out of the equation.

[dnanian]

It should work. Try starting in "Verbose" mode from the drive (Cmd+v during boot), to see if there are any errors...

[mrpixel]

Dave, I ran the verbose boot mode. Can't say that the report was very meaningful to me however the last few lines before it hung were as follows:-

MCXD.InitializeDirectoryServices: Unable to get ethernet address
nothing to load
Warning Method -cgsevent in class NSEvent is obsolete and will be removed in release 10.4

This IS 10.4.10 so it obviously wasn't removed, whatever it is!

After that, no more reports but the fan speed goes up and up and up and I switch off before meltdown.

[dnanian]

Hm. That looks like something weird (and old) is loading. Try booting in Safe Boot (Shift while starting).

[mrpixel]

No, a safe Boot gives me the same grey Apple Screen with spinning propellor. It will be interesting to transfer the clone to my new internal drive when it comes tomorrow. That will show if it is a hardware or software problem.

[dnanian]

Safe Boot is significantly slower than regular boot: you'll have a spinner for quite a while...

[mrpixel]

What about those fans that are going full blast in the meantime? I don't like it when that happens. It means that there is a lot of heat being generated by the processors.

[dnanian]

The fans do that for safety, actually: it's not that there's actually heat, it's that they're software controlled, and if they don't get "commanded", they default to full-on.