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Cannot Use USB For Startup Disk - Tiger 10.4

N

neenja

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 17, 2008
292
0
Hello,

I have this some what old Power Mac G5 rig here with a busted cd drive. Trying to upgrade it to leopard os x. Searched all over the place and found the best way to do this is to create an image file (.dmg) and restore it onto an external harddrive.. I have an 8gb microsd that I am using to do this via usb thumbdrive reader.

Now here is where the problem is..

When I go into Startup Disk on this desktop (Tiger) the USB simply does not show up! I cannot figure out why.. I've restored the USB using both APM (apple partition map) and GUID.. both still unable to be seen in the Startup Disk list of options.

Now, I take my USB with the leopard dvd install on it and plug it into my buddy's MacBookPro which is already running leopard.. I pull up startup disk and BAM, there it is! I was even able to boot into it like a normal install..

Does anyone have any idea why this is not working on my Desktop running Tiger?


Please help :(
 
DAH!

A whole day of searching and nothing I found said that.

Thank You Eidorian!
 
well this sucks for me.. my external hd only has USB.. dont have any firewire plugs around here.

Any small hack to get around this problem?
 
neenja said:
well this sucks for me.. my external hd only has USB.. dont have any firewire plugs around here.

Any small hack to get around this problem?
Click to expand...

No afraid not. FireWire and USB signals are handled totally differently by your Mac's circuitry- no hacks are forthcoming. You must have an enclosure with FW circuitry (which cost a little more than a straight USB case) to boot from a PowerPC Mac.

BTW- you could save quite a bit of money by buying a FW equipped enclosure and just transferring your drive over to it rather than buying a complete external drive. Just make sure to check ahead to see if your drive is a SATA drive (most likely) or an older IDE/PATA drive so that you get the right type of internal connection in your enclosure.
 
Try plugging your USB thing in, then turning off your computer. Then, hold down alt/option and press the power button and keep holding alt/option until the screen turns on. You should have your Macintosh HD and USB volume as boot options.
 
ElectroGhandi said:
Try plugging your USB thing in, then turning off your computer. Then, hold down alt/option and press the power button and keep holding alt/option until the screen turns on. You should have your Macintosh HD and USB volume as boot options.
Click to expand...

That would work great if the OP had aMac with an Intel processor since they can boot from USB or FireWire drives, but as Eidorian first pointed out above the OP's PowerPC based PowerMac G5 can only boot from FireWire drives. USB drives don't show up in the Option key screen of PPC based Macs since they are not bootable volumes.
 
Hi,

I have been trying to use a USB harddisk to boot an intel mac. But my USB does not show in the startup disk. What may be the problem?
 
I have used GUID Partition Table. I have loaded Fedora which has changed the file system to ext3. But that should not be a problem i guess.
 
divi2109 said:
I have used GUID Partition Table. I have loaded Fedora which has changed the file system to ext3. But that should not be a problem i guess.
Click to expand...
Well for OSX if the filesystem is not Mac OS Extended with a GUID partition table map it won't be bootable on an Intel based Mac.
 
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