New External HD...Mac won't boot

[Rick Westfall]

Hi all,

Here is my current set up. I have a fairly new iMac with a newly added external Seagate HD. I am not booting from the external drive, it is purely external storage of data for my computer. Everything was coasting along just fine until I powered down my computer. Next morning I power it up and it won't boot. I get a light gray screen, no apple, and just quick "bongs" that repeat every two seconds. I power down again and start in safe mode. Everything is fine. I restart and it boots fine...but now the Seagate isn't being recognized. If I physically unplug the power from the seagate and plug it back in, it spins up and is now recognized. Obviously, the seagate is conflicting with the start up of my machine but I don't know where the setting is keep my iMac from looking at that drive at startup.

Help.

Thanks
Rick

 

[lugesm]

Hi all,

Here is my current set up. I have a fairly new iMac with a newly added external Seagate HD. I am not booting from the external drive, it is purely a backup of data for my computer. Everything was coasting along just fine until I powered down my computer. Next morning I power it up and it won't boot. I get a light gray screen, no apple, and just quick "bongs" that repeat every two seconds. I power down again and start in safe mode. Everything is fine. I restart and it boots fine...but now the Seagate isn't being recognized. If I physically unplug the power from the seagate and plug it back in, it spins up and is now recognized. Obviously, the seagate is conflicting with the start up of my machine but I don't know where the setting is keep my iMac from looking at that drive at startup.

Help.

Thanks
Rick

Hello Rick,

Coincidentally, I did exactly the same thing last night. Used SuperDuper to back up my iMac hard drive on an external Seagate hard drive. My iMac still boots properly and I have not seen this problem. I DID make the external drive bootable with SuperDuper, but I have not yet attempted to boot from that USB drive.

None of this helps you, I know; but the fact that my setup did not have any problems might indicate that you have a hardware issue; or your backup software might be different. Did you use SuperDuper?

 

[Rick Westfall]

I didn't use any backup software. Maybe that is my problem. I reformatted the Seagate since it was formatted for windows and then just moved the big files over to the Seagate to clear my iMac hard drive. I'm upgrading to Leopard soon and will use Time Machine for the official back up software.

So in my case, it really isn't being used as a true backup yet, just extra storage.

Rick

 

[lugesm]

I didn't use any backup software. Maybe that is my problem. I reformatted the Seagate since it was formatted for windows and then just moved the big files over to the Seagate to clear my iMac hard drive. I'm upgrading to Leopard soon and will use Time Machine for the official back up software.

So in my case, it really isn't being used as a true backup yet, just extra storage.

Rick

Hi Rick,

Well, I am not sure. Before I created a true backup with SuperDuper, I connected another hard drive and dragged a lot of my old Windows files over to the external HD. I did NOT, however, move any Mac files to this drive. Possibly you moved some Mac-critical file to the external HD, and the Mac sees some kind of conflict. Just a guess . . .

Hope someone else on the forum can give you better answers than I could provide. I am a 15+ Windows user and have just switched to Mac.

 

[Rick Westfall]

Just for the sake of the thread, I only brought over iTunes music, movies and video files. Hopefully there isn't any Mac critical stuff in there.

Thanks
Rick

 

[lugesm]

Just for the sake of the thread, I only brought over iTunes music, movies and video files. Hopefully there isn't any Mac critical stuff in there.

Thanks
Rick

No. I would think not. Deepens the mystery.

Hope someone can throw some light on the problem.