How do I boot from external firewire harddrive?

If you haven't installed an OS, you can't boot off it. As far as a backup of your current drive, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner (free) with the "make bootable" option to clone your current boot disk. When CCC is done, you select the FW drive in "Startup Disk" under "System Preferences" and reboot.

HTH

 

Alos, once you have a bootable system on the FW drive, you can hold down the "option" key at power-on and that will take you into a screen where you can choose what device (internal HD, optical drive, network, ext FW drive) you want to boot from.

It doesn't always work (thanks I think to a bug in 10.3.7) so sometimes you have to select it in "Startup Disk" pref pane to get it to boot.

Remember that the OS X install CD had the Startup Disk app on it, so you can use that to choose your bootup device, if your internal drive isn't booting properly and the FW drive isn't being seen in the aforementioned boot select screen.

 

Wait it's a bug in 10.3.7 that causes the option thing not to work? I though that was not even part of the OS.

 

This comment from MacFixits troubleshooting 10.3.7

There does seem to be a problem of some sort.

yesterday I cloned a 10.3.7 onto an ext FW drive. The drive couldn't be seen using the "option" key boot, but could be selected using "startup disk" (which is how I got it to boot).

all a bit strange

 

I can't get anything to boot on my external FW drive. I tried to boot 10.3.3 installed off of my Panther Disks, and that failed. Holding Option down at startup brought up nothing. Selecting it as my startup drive in System Preferences which seems to have worked for some people, did not work for me. Am I missing something here? My OS is 10.3.7 on my computer... I also tried CarbonCopyCloning that to my FW drive, but still no go on all fronts.


This sucks.