Booting to Ext Drive: 1 Drive Works, 1 Hangs

[geekboy2000]

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my OS X 10.4.5 drive, and below are the results:

Copied to LaCie 160GB connected via firewire. When OPTION key is pressed at startup, the drive shows, and I can boot to it . . up to a point. There's activity for about 10 seconds, then a long pause, then more activity for about 10 more seconds, then . . nothing. Grey Apple screen with the circular progress indicator just spinning. I gave it more than 5 minutes and gave up.

Copied to a Samsung 200GB drive in a Mad Dog firewire enclosure. Did it exactly the same way (with CCC). The drive shows at boot (now, along with the LaCie), but when I choose it, it boots into the desktop. It also pauses for awhile, but the time was totally reasonable, and in fact, I am now on that drive.

Any idea as to what might be wrong with the boot process from the LaCie drive? In addition to attempting to boot from it a few times, I also repeated the clone process. Still no go from that drive, although there is never an error displayed. Thanks!

Mark

 

[geekboy2000]

Okay, got it to boot (quick, BTW) after repairing permissions. Still, it's not quite right, aas I got 3 error dialog boxes once the desktop started. All were related to .hid extensions, I believe (one associated with an ATI preference add-on). This wasn't necessary on the Samsung. On that drive CCC did the job perfectly. Even though I have CCC set to erase first, I'm thinking I should wipe the LaCie boot partition with disk utility and try again. At least now I know it *can* work, but the LaCie is surely more particular about things than the Samsung drive.

Mark

 

[superwoman]

Even though I have CCC set to erase first, I'm thinking I should wipe the LaCie boot partition with disk utility and try again.

That's what I always do. I find CCC's erase function to be not so reliable. It's better to wipe the slate clean before copying over.

Another thing you can check: If you cloned target disk is bootable, then it should show up on System Preferences->Startup Disk.

 

[geekboy2000]

The drive does show as a startup disc, but tonight's project will be the manual erase first, followed by CCC. Thanks for your reply.

Mark

 

[geekboy2000]

Booting to Ext Drive: 1 Drive Works, 1 Hangs - Solution

The solution:

Use Disk Utility to erase the boot drive partition, then use CCC to copy the drive image. The LaCie now boots perfectly. Apparently, CCC may have issues with the "erase" option. I believe the Samsung worked right off, because that drive/partition was clean when I first used CCC. Anyway, all is well now. Thanks Superwoman!

Mark