You ca n’t boot OS X from a USB strong drive .
That might be onetime news program to the more technical school savvy among you . But it ’s something that a lot of people do n’t seem to bonk . In fact , only one person I ask — include many common people working for large campaign manufacturing business — knew anything about this limitation in OS X.
Here ’s how I found that out while working on the test rooms for our extraneous hard drive review . Along with our received set of material - human race speed tests , we decided to ensure that each external parkway we reviewed could be used as a bootable backup of a user ’s system .
Using Carbon Copy Cloner fromBombich Software , I make a record effigy of a system run OS X 10.3.8 . Then I ’d mount the magnetic disk figure of speech , adjust it as the source and then set the external cause as the target and hit the Clone button .
The first couple of drives I prove were FireWire - only and I had no job booting from these new cloned outside drives .
The next thrust had only USB port . I attached the parkway and was capable to set it as the target and Carbon Copy Cloner go about its stage business . When the clone operation was eat up , I go to System Preferences / Startup Disk . I found the USB ride in the listing of available startup organisation , choose it , and restarted my Power Mac G5 . The computer ponder it over for a minute , but settle to reboot up from the interior private road instead . I tried again , but had no luck .
I looked online and find one drive manufacturer and a duet of forum postings directing citizenry to Apple Knowledge Base article stating that a “ gadget such as a SuperDisk , Zip disc , or other USB storage drive can be used to contain a valid system booklet and used at startup . ”
It was n’t work for me , so I asked a few the great unwashed if they ’d ever tried it . The oecumenical reception was , “ Boot from USB ? I have n’t tried it , but I do n’t see why not . ”
Assuming that I had done something wrong , I decide to try installing the OS directly from an OS X 10.3x disk . After inserting the disk and rebooting , I last got the solution . The installer recognise the drive , but would not permit me set up onto the USB drive say that OS X can not startup from this gadget .
I call in the drive ’s maker to see if they were cognizant of this problem . It turn out that they were n’t , though their technical school support folks were capable to multiply it the next day . Just last calendar week another drive trafficker was in to demonstrate their latest products , a duad of which were USB - only devices . They too were surprised when I mentioned the restriction .
That ’s why I make up one’s mind I ’d share this with you . To some of you this will be no surprise , but if you ’re like most people I ’ve address to recently , and you ’re in the securities industry for an outside driving force , you wo n’t have to check the hard way that USB just wo n’t reboot in OS X.
