Hi, I've made a clone of my hard drive onto my usb external hard drive using superduper. When I start up my macbook and hold option, my external drive is one of the choices to boot from, but when I choose it, the screen just goes to the apple logo with twirling circle. It seems like it's going to boot up, but it just stays like that and will never actually boot. Does anyone have any idea why this may happen?
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Boot from external usb hard drive
- Thread starter jswimboy
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Goto Disk Utility and click on the drive, not the volume. In the lower right of the Disk Utility screen what is the Partition Scheme. It must be GUID Partition Table to boot an Intel Mac. If its not that you could try Disk Utility or Diskwarrior to check the external disk for errors.
Cheers,
Hmmm, i don't know what could be causing that. I use SuperDuper all the time and have 4 bootable external drives. Have you tried swapping the drives to determine if the external housing is no good? If your copy works as the internal disk, something is most likely not right with the housing.
Best wishes,
Are you using Tiger or Leopard? SuperDuper is not yet compatible with Leopard but should be in less than a week.
If you're using Tiger I'd try re-cloning a bootable back-up to your external USB Drive.
Otherwise give Carbon Copy Cloner a try. I had preferred Super Duper but their Leopard update has now taken nearly 3 months! CCC has been working fine for me in Leopard and now integrates the same thing as SuperDuper's "smart updates" so my daily update only takes about 15 minutes. You can download a free uncrippled copy of CCC from their website (but the developer appreciates donations).
Good luck!
If you're using Tiger I'd try re-cloning a bootable back-up to your external USB Drive.
Otherwise give Carbon Copy Cloner a try. I had preferred Super Duper but their Leopard update has now taken nearly 3 months! CCC has been working fine for me in Leopard and now integrates the same thing as SuperDuper's "smart updates" so my daily update only takes about 15 minutes. You can download a free uncrippled copy of CCC from their website (but the developer appreciates donations).
Good luck!
Boot up using your Leopard disk, you can use disk utility to restore your original disk to the new drive
As I mentioned in vague terms, once you do an entire clone with CCC, the following clones can update only changed items on the source drive (similar to SuperDuper's "smart updtate") CCC's wording on how to do these incremental updates is a bit more cryptic than SuperDuper though, so be sure to read the instructions a bit so you get the clone you want. I think the "Smart Update" feature in CCC works in this way:
you select to copy the entire source drive (by default all folders and directories are selected) to the target drive, but then select "delete items that don't exist on the source drive" (of course, this type of clone is AFTER you have previously done an entire clone of the drive!)
It's sort of a cryptic backwards way of saying "make the 2 drives identical without re-cloning the whole drive"
But, don't take my word for it...read the how-to
Good luck!
Question... USB boot to normal internal drive
If I use SuperDuper and clone my OSX mac drive to an external usb drive, will I then be able to take it out of the external case and put it in my macbook laptop and use it as a normal interal drive?
If I use SuperDuper and clone my OSX mac drive to an external usb drive, will I then be able to take it out of the external case and put it in my macbook laptop and use it as a normal interal drive?