How do you boot off a MBA superdrive? Or do you?

Intel Macs are able to boot from USB, so while the SuperDrive is connected, either choose the inserted bootable media as boot device in System Preferences > Startup Disk or press C during startup to boot from the SD or use OPTION to show all bootable devices connected to the Mac.

Press and hold the [option] key while booting. I know it was mentioned above but a little vague.

Good luck.

I boot it to use disk warrior, for that I think I hold down D while booting. I actually use the SuperDrive quite often to burn DVDs as well

California said:

So that means if you swap out an ATA hard drive in the Apple Superdrive case, you can boot off an ATA hard drive externally?

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I have seen a mod where someone did that before, but I remember that it required either a new different board or some modifications to the original one, I'm not sure if it was even bootable.

Why not go to futureshop and get a $20 Hard drive enclosure?

Also the connections from the disc drive and pretty much any hard drive are very different.

California said:

No, I have a MacAlly usb/firewire enclosure for both laptop and desktop hard drives...

so I can just boot off USB on my Mac Mini and off a Mac Book Air with usb?

I had no idea. I guess you could NOT do this with the old aluminum MacBook?

Confused over this whole USB booting issue. I thought it was only possible to boot into Windoze or something.

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If you have a valid boot drive, then yes, you can boot off of USB. All Intel Macs are capable of booting from USB. PPC Macs cannot boot from USB, but they can boot from Firewire.

You could install OS X to an external USB drive (or even a large enough flash drive) and boot to that installation. It's great as a diagnostic tool. You could also clone your installation media to a USB flash drive and use that for installs. The benefit of that is that it would be much faster than installing from a DVD.

In the past, Windows has had some issues with booting from USB or Firewire because the USB/FW drivers are not loaded until later on in the boot sequence. I'm not sure if this is the case with Windows 7, but I know it was for XP and Vista. If you can follow directions, there are ways to create a custom installation that will let you boot Windows from external drives, but in general it doesn't work.

one 'Boots' a PC but one 'Starts' a Mac.

please use correct terminology boys and girls

You can boot off any external drive; just be sure to use the right partition scheme (GPT); if you have a PowerPC, you would use Apple Partition.

halledise said:

one 'Boots' a PC but one 'Starts' a Mac.

please use correct terminology boys and girls

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There's system specific terminology now?

alphaod said:

You can boot off any external drive; just be sure to use the right partition scheme (GPT); if you have a PowerPC, you would use Apple Partition.



There's system specific terminology now?

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Yup - always has been.
for example, Macs have a 'startup' chime not a 'boot' chime.
try looking ar your menu where you will note the word 'Restart'

but if you prefer to continue to 'boot' or 'reboot' your Mac then feel free.
me and many others will continue to 'start up' and 'restart'.