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Is booting a cloned 2012 Air supported by Western Digital My Passport 1 TB USB 3.0

C

celebrityoasis

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 23, 2011
8
4
When I opened Carbon Copy Cloner, the documentation leads to this list of Mac-bootable WD External Drives. I would like to know if the Western Digital My Passport 1 TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive will be able to boot a clone of my new 2012 MacBook Air via USB 3.0?

It is explained that this drive should not be bootable on Intel-based Macs through FireWire (1394a/b) but there is no mention of whether this drive will be bootable through USB on an Intel Mac.

If you could offer any insight, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!
 
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celebrityoasis said:
When I opened Carbon Copy Cloner, the documentation leads to this list of Mac-bootable WD External Drives. I would like to know if the Western Digital My Passport 1 TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive will be able to boot a clone of my new 2012 MacBook Air via USB 3.0?

It is explained that this drive should not be bootable on Intel-based Macs through FireWire (1394a/b) but there is no mention of whether this drive will be bootable through USB on an Intel Mac.

If you could offer any insight, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!
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It would indeed be difficult to boot from this drive using FireWire since it lacks a FireWire port. Maybe you could jam the FW cable in there, but I suspect that it would still not work.

I've been using CCC for years and have never checked any documentation. I've used drives from most of the main manufacturers and have never had issues with booting off them. I am not sure why WD thinks that some of their drives will not work. It's quite odd to me. A word of advice: don't ever install the crud applications and any software that comes with single external drives. It's not necessary and can cause weird issues. Why are you looking at that drive anyway? It's one of the slowest USB 3 2.5" externals on the market. I would suggest a verbatim store n go. I've just ordered one yesterday and can tell you in the next couple of days how it works.

I always simply format the drive into hfs and fire up CCC. I still don't see how a drive could possibly decide to be bootable or not. :confused: Don't forget to set the option in CCC to also clone your recovery hd if it's important to you and you're using lion.
 
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I always hate finding a post where someone has the same issue as me only to find that they didn't report back with their findings.

Well, here are my findings: it works. All I did was erase any existing data on the drive, partition it for the Mac and it was ready to go. The clone worked perfectly.
 
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