I have created a clone of my MacBook Pro on a firewire My Passport HD using Personal Backup X5 - sucessful reports X5. How do I boot from this My Passport HD? I do not want to restore, just want to see if it can be done - just a boot test. How will I know which OS (MackBook or Passport) is in use?
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There may be two ways of doing this. First you can boot into your OS X installed on your MacBook Pro and select the external disk as your startup disk:
http://support.apple.
Another thing you can do is hold down the option key when you boot. This should load a screen that will give you a choice between boot options.
I hope this helps. Good luck.
With the Firewire HD (with Clone) connected, holding down Option @ boot shows only MacBook HD. After boot from MacBook HD, System Preferences...Startup Disk shows both MacBook & Passport Firewire HD as restart options.
Selecting Passport Firewire HD & restarting brings up OSX. Two Questions:
1. How do I know which OS (MacBook or Passport Firewire HD) is running. I don't want to disconnect Passport HD to find out! - NB - see below
2. At Macbook boot w/Option held down, will MacBook boot from Firewire HD if corrupt or no OS on Macbook? In other words, how does the MacBook know to boot from Passport FireWire HD?
I deleted two (Documents) files (to trash) after holding down Option @ boot & CMD-OPT-SHIFT-DELETE while booting. The files were not deleted from the Passport FireWire HD - only from the MacBook HD. Seems like the system never booted from the Passport FireWire HD. The Personal Backup X5 created file is in a Passport FireWire HD partition
What now?
To tell the difference between them I would rename your hard drive on one of them. Instead of Macintosh HD rename one to Firewire HD.
You can try using Command-Option-Shift-Delet
http://www.fif3.com
I hope this helps. Good luck.
I have 500GB Lacie Firewire drive on iMac desktop with boot partition 'iMac Disk Image'. Holding down Option while booting iMac desktop shows the iMac Disk Image which is bootable. This iMac Disk Image (bootable) was also created with Personal Backup X5. iMac Disk Image is formatted Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled).
Renamed 'My Passport' HD to Boson Boot (my computers have elementary particle names) - still will not show at boot time w/Option held down. Boson Boot is formatted Mac OS Extended, (Journaled).
CMD-OPT-SHIFT-DELETE while booting has no effectg - boots to iMac OS.
How do I get Boson Boot to be recognized as bootable device?
Try making a new clone using the freeware Carbon Copy Cloner from http://www.bombich.com and make sure that you tick the Make Bootable box.
>>Also make sure the external is formatted using the GUID partition scheme, not the Apple Partition Map. (Use Disk Utility to format it)
How do I know if GUID? I have 2 Macs w/intel chip & OS 10.5.5. Disk Utility offers no format option. Information (right-click on disc icon) about Lacie extenal firewire HD reports all 4 partitions as bootable, 3 are just data - what does this mean?
I have used iPartition 3.1 and Personal Backup X5 for all external firewire HD operations.
>>Does the external drive show in the Startup Disk System Preferences?
Yes, it does
>>If so, select it as the startup disk and reboot.
This does work with my external Lacie 500GB firewire HD with a bootable partition.
Again, External HD My Passport, named 'boson boot' will *not* work as bootable external HD. My external Lacie 500GB firewire HD has a bootable partition 'iMac Disk Image' which does work as a bootable partition - my desktop iMac will boot from this partition.
Is there some reason the 500GB WDC My Passport will not support a bootable partition? If it will, then why does it not seem to work?
I repartitioned 'Boson Boot' to GUID & Apple_HFS with iPartition 3.1 and replaced bootable partition with Personal Backup X5. Still not recognized as bootable partition at startup. With System Preferences&Startup Disc shows My Passport Studio as startup option.
My two Macs do not recognize bootable partition with Option or Command-Option-Shift-Delet
Is this device WDMT5000TN capable of serving as a boot drive? I sure hope so as I have 2 of them as Christmas presents as boot/backup drives!
WDC thinks so: "external hard drive must contain a HFS+ GUID or APM (Apple Partition Map) partition in order to boot."
Also from WDC: Open the Applications folder. Open the Utilities folder. Select Disk Utility. Once the drive is selected click on Partition. No such Option as far as I can tell
In spite of WDC web site statement that this device (WDMT5000TN - My Passport Studio) is capable of serving as a boot drive (see link below), WDC tech suppport says this is *not* supported.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cg
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by: jhyieslaPosted on 2008-12-13 at 10:22:14ID: 23164862
Try holding down CMD-OPT-SHIFT-DELETE while booting. This is supposed to for the mac to boot form an external drive. If that doesn't work you might try holding down the option key. This should force the mac to look for other boot partitions... I know that it works with bootcamp where the BC partition is on the same disk as the OS X one. If this is successful, you will be shown two options to choose from; one is the mac and the other is your external disk.