Boot from USB

[karohan]

Is there a way I can boot my Macbook Pro from USB? Is there a way I can format that USB in a way that it can also be bootable in a PC as well?

 

[Daelos]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Install the os to your USB drive, and change startup disk in system preferences or hold alt while booting normally to get to the disk selection screen.

As for getting it to boot on windows, don't think that's possible: don't know that much about hackintoshs.

 

[andymodem]

You can use bootable USB drives on PCs. What's your goal with that? Install Linux, Windows, etc off a thumb drive? You'd have to partition the thumb drive probably, as Windows dosn't read HFS+ by default.

 

[Daelos]

personally i like keeping a copy of my OS on a partition of a portable hard drive. As a student currently thinking of upgrading and having had to have apple repair keyboard/trackpad and logic board of a 2007 mbp, its nice to have the security of being able to work on a mates/studio machine in the case that this one goes down. wouldn't have met deadlines without it!

can understand it's not for everyone though, and i guess time machine pretty much, if not does, offer the same kind of peace of mind

 

[karohan]

Thanks for the replies! I'm sorry, but I don't think I was being totally clear, but I don't want to install OS X on my USB drive. I just want a persistent install of Linux on it for the odd times that I'll want to boot into it. I was curious to see if I could make a bootable USB with linux on it that my Macbook Pro could boot from.
At the same time, I didn't want to just have a USB drive that would only Macs could boot from (though this is better than nothing). I was curious to see if there was a way to make the USB bootable in a PC as well.

 

[Daelos]

fair to say i know nothing about booting linux on a mac or a pc, but to get a usb device working across both mac and pc, you'll need to format it to fat 32 in disk utility. after that, i couldnt see why it wouldnt be possible?

 

[karohan]

I don't think a FAT32 drive is bootable? Not to mention, I don't even think I could install Linux on a drive formatted to that.