MacBook not booting from external Hard Drive.

[chrisvince]

Hi,

I have a Black Macbook with 2GB ram, 250GB HDD, 2.4GHz Processor and have been trying to boot off of my 320GB firewire External HDD but it has so far been unsuccessful.

I have the external formatted as GUID Partition Table, and have the four system disk folders on the drive (Applications, Library, System, Users) which I copied from a time machine backup.

I have tried booting the MB while holding down the option key and the external HDD appears as a drive available for booting on. But when I select the external HDD a cross with a circle around it appears and it boots off the internal HDD instead of the external HDD.

Is there anything I'm doing wrong???

Thanks

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Copying over the System folders won't work, there are lots of hidden folders that won't be transferred using a normal Finder drag and drop. You might get around this, but it's probably more hassle than it's worth...

You should either install OS X on the external from an installer disk or use a cloning tool like SuperDuper! to make a clone of a (working) Mac OS X boot disk.

 

[Thiol]

I'm a big fan of using the Restore function in Disk Utility. This will also generate a bootable clone of your drive to the external. SuperDuper and CCC exclude some files from the cloning, so I feel more comfortable with Disk Utility. The trade off is that Disk Utility takes longer...