So I recently purchased a 16 GB iamakey from Lacie. I saw in an article in MacLife how to install a stripped down version of OS X on it to use as a rescue tool. I partitioned the drive into a 2gb and 14gb sections. The 2gb i want to use as just a flash drive for toting files. I installed OS X on the 14 GB section. The installation completes, but when I try to boot in, I just get a gray screen. The mouse can be seen. What went wrong? I have done this twice following the instructions.
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Booting Mac OS X from 16GB Flash Drive
- Thread starter the.omnibus
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Is the partition map scheme set to GUID?
Btw, using a USB flash drive too boot an OS from might be really, really slow, as most flash drives have write and read speeds below 10MB/s.
Btw, using a USB flash drive too boot an OS from might be really, really slow, as most flash drives have write and read speeds below 10MB/s.
"I partitioned the drive into a 2gb and 14gb sections. The 2gb i want to use as just a flash drive for toting files. I installed OS X on the 14 GB section. The installation completes, but when I try to boot in, I just get a gray screen. The mouse can be seen. What went wrong? I have done this twice following the instructions."
Suggestion:
RE-partition the flashdrive into a SINGLE partition (GUID).
Then do an OS re-install.
See if it can be booted using only the single partition.
If it works that way, forget about a "second partition" for "file toting".
Instead, just create a folder on the drive named "storage" or whatever, and put the files you need to carry around in there.
Of course this won't work if you're going to be using the drive with Windows PCs. But if you're "Mac only", it might be worth the try.
Suggestion:
RE-partition the flashdrive into a SINGLE partition (GUID).
Then do an OS re-install.
See if it can be booted using only the single partition.
If it works that way, forget about a "second partition" for "file toting".
Instead, just create a folder on the drive named "storage" or whatever, and put the files you need to carry around in there.
Of course this won't work if you're going to be using the drive with Windows PCs. But if you're "Mac only", it might be worth the try.
Or you can add the partition after the fact. The beautiful thing about Mac OS X is that you can make partitions on the fly without erasing data. It will just shrink/expand existing partitions. IIRC, the same can be said about Windows Vista & 7.