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Cant Boot From External Harddrive (usb)

C

CainFool

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 13, 2010
16
0
Hi everyone. Sorry if I am in the wrong forum, as you can guess im a newbie at the forum - not at computers though (6 years experience.. :) )

So I have a 1TB WD Harddrive USB and I copied the Leopard Disk image and restored it onto it in a 500GB partition.

I have tried to boot it up normally by holding down Alt on startup but the drive doesn't come up. Ok.

I have tried going into the Startup Disk, it comes up and when I click on it and click restart it doesnt restart, it just does that Mac Beep thing.

I have recently just tried to boot it up manually using the Open Firmware technique. It doesn't work.

I have a PPC Mac and I know that they can't normally boot up USB Drives but the other users which I read on the thread how to boot up by the Firmware technique said they're PPC and it worked.

So if anyone can help, please do!

I just wanted to format my computer, My leopard disk is gone now but I got it copied JUST IN TIME to my Harddrive.

I formatted my computer and now i'm stuck on Tiger.

I have literally tried for weeks to try to get this done on my own but with absolute no luck. So if you can help me, please do - help a newb! :) :apple:
 
Hold alt. When the selection menu comes up, if the disk isn't shown, unplug it then replug it in.

Western Digital doesn't recommend using their external drives as bootable drives though. Just FYI.
 
ayeying said:
Hold alt. When the selection menu comes up, if the disk isn't shown, unplug it then replug it in.
Click to expand...

Tried it - it doesn't work. I re-plugged it multiple times with no luck. There was a boy on the thread who used a WD to install Leopard and it worked.
 
CainFool said:
Tried it - it doesn't work. I re-plugged it multiple times with no luck. There was a boy on the thread who used a WD to install Leopard and it worked.
Click to expand...

I know it works. All my drives excluding 1x 120GB are Western Digitals. I've booted it off many times but usually are slower and some random issue on the newer drives.

I'm not sure whats going on. For me, I can unplug it then replug it in and it'll show up.
 
So how many hard drives do you have installled internal?

You can take the WD external apart and use the drive as an internal to boot from if you need to. Then once you get everything set up put the WD back together.
 
I think that the key here is that you are on a PPC where most of the current experience is with Intel MACs (I sold my PowerBook before Leopard arrived so I do not have PPC and Leopard experience).

When booted in Tiger with the external USB drive attached, is the USB drive mounted? Meaning can you use Finder and see the file system on the USB drive?

If the answer is yes, when you run diskutility, what file system do you see when you select the USB Leopard partition?

There is an cnet article that may help at http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10329087-263.html

neil
 
neilhart said:
When booted in Tiger with the external USB drive attached, is the USB drive mounted? Meaning can you use Finder and see the file system on the USB drive?
Click to expand...

Yes it is mounted, I have full access over it, I can partition it, restore it, erase it, RAID it, I can do pretty much everything. It is a Mac OSX Extended drive, and my other partition is a Mac OSX Extended (Journaled) drive.

Would this make a difference?
 
Quote this artilce.

"The secret behind the universality of the Leopard boot disk is that, although a PowerPC Mac will not boot from a GUID-partitioned disk (the "native" partitioning for an Intel Mac boot disk), an Intel Mac will boot from an APM-partitioned disk (the "native" partitioning for a PPC boot disk)."

The question is the USB Leopard partition a "Apple Partition Map" or a GUID partition?

neil
 
neilhart said:
Quote this artilce.

"The secret behind the universality of the Leopard boot disk is that, although a PowerPC Mac will not boot from a GUID-partitioned disk (the "native" partitioning for an Intel Mac boot disk), an Intel Mac will boot from an APM-partitioned disk (the "native" partitioning for a PPC boot disk)."

The question is the USB Leopard partition a "Apple Partition Map" or a GUID partition?

neil
Click to expand...

Sorry - It's a APM. I have chanced a while ago formatting my drive to GUID but the loading bar didn't move when partitioning.

So it's a APM.
 
Hey everyone im in school at the moment - sorry I didn't get to reply to some of your posts. I'm lucky this site isn't blocked from the servers :/

So what I did this morning was use an Old-ish Version of SuperDuper, bought for £13 - bargain! and I hear it makes external harddrives bootable, I tried it but once again, no luck. I actually had to end up partitioning my harddrive again.

So SuperDuper - no good.

Any tips? Thanks!
 
On TIger ppc and the recieved wisdom is that you can only boot from a firewire drive and have never been able to boot from usb drive. As a previous post said may be different in leopard.
 
Ps. Have used SuperDuper successfully on two backup drives. One internal and the other firewire.
 
Ok im back at my house. I sneeked into the I.T. room in school :)

So I don't have a Firewire Drive and unfortunately I can't take my USB one back and replace it with a Firewire cause I don't have the receipt!!

I'll try doing a disk repair and all that with all my drives - but I doubt it will work. I was looking on another forum about this, Does "Drive Owners" matter?

Came across a program called QuickBoot - my drive comes up??
Picture3.png

but.. when I click the drive it reboots and it just goes back to Mac OSX Tiger. :(
 
I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner and I officially got this error,
Picture4.png


Will my only solution to be able to burn it onto a New DL Disc or get a Firewire Drive?
 
I Would like to thank everyone who has helped me as I am now typing this on Leopard. I've spent 3 hours partitioning my harddrive, installing tiger, restoring the leopard disk onto the partition and installing.

Unfortunately that was my only way - but I guess a fresh start, eyh!
 
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