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Cannot boot Snow Leopard from external FireWire drive

I use a Western Digital My Passport Studio 500 GB external drive to back up my MacBook Pro with Time Machine. I had created a 30 GB Leopard boot partition with various utilities and tools; since the small drive goes wherever the laptop goes, I figured it might come in handy to be able to boot the computer in the event something went wrong with its internal 250 GB drive.

Over the weekend, I upgraded the external drive to Snow Leopard, and now it can no longer be used to boot the laptop. The symptoms are truly weird. Holding down the Option key while rebooting does not show the external drive unless I disconnect and reconnect the FireWire cable. The drive then shows up. I select it, and it appears to begin to boot, then it just sits on the gray screen with the little round thingie turning for a long time (five to ten minutes). Eventually, the system boots from its internal drive. This happens regardless of whether I'm connected by means of FireWire 400 or 800.

After spending a lot of time looking at the usual suspects (cables, permissions, PRAM, etc.) I reinstalled Sand Leopard (OK, 10.5) and lo and behold, the drive boots again (though for some reason I still have to go through the disconnect/reconnect routine). Clearly, something in the OS has changed with respect to the way booting from external drives is handled.

On the positive side, I have none of the symptoms described in other threads: Time Machine works flawlessly, and both the boot partition and the Time Machine partition appear on the Snow Leopard desktop every time I connect the drive.

Does anyone have the same issues? Does anyone know of a workaround?

Thanks,

Daniel

Jan 08 Mac Pro 8-core 2.8 / 3.5 TB HD / 10 GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.6), 15" MacBook Pro / 250 GB HD / 3 GB RAM

Posted on Aug 31, 2009 4:35 AM

26 replies

Sep 4, 2009 1:24 AM in response to Howard Ferguson

Howard Ferguson wrote:
In my experience Daniel-
Snow Leopard always shows up as a Start Up Disk in the System Preferences.
The only HDs that show up while holding down the Option key at Start Up, are bootable Partitions on the Internal HD.

That's never been my experience. All bootable devices visible to the system (including all bootable partitions on all internal and external drives -- except my Passport drive --, the Snow Leopard DVD, etc.) always show up for me in the boot volume selection screen (which you get to by holding down the Option key when you restart). It's the same as in System Preferences: if the system thinks you can boot from it, it's supposed to show up.

For whatever reason, the Passport drive needs to be unplugged and re-plugged to show up. Once that has been done, Sierra Whiskey (I'm getting thirsty, and it's only 10:20 in the morning where I am...) can boot from the Passport with Snow Leopard installed, whereas I cannot.

To reiterate: I have other FireWire drives, and none of them are a problem.

Daniel

Sep 4, 2009 10:15 AM in response to Daniel Kiechle

Daniel ... LOL — and my sincerest apologies. I'd like to blame it on an auto-complete buffer but it was probably just my carelessness. 🙂

-----------------
Howard ... Currently my production machine (MBP) is running 10.5.8. I wouldn't dare to migrate over to "snowy" until I've had a chance to evaluate the impact on my workflow. That's why I upgraded the Passport. Your suggestion about taking it one-step-at-a-time is wise advice. Early adopters are always at higher risk.

None-the-less, this is a recoverable glitch and I'm always more concerned about my LR, CS2 and CS4 suites production platforms keeping to my specs. So far there have only been a few typeface issues — and it's usually with third party plug-ins. My programming environments such as MAMP, AIR and DW all appear to be running without a hitch. This all points to a safe migration in another 45-90 days. The performance enhancements inside "snowy" are already boosting productivity.

Here's to 10.6.x .... 🙂

Sep 6, 2009 3:59 AM in response to Sierra Whiskey

Not sure if this is related, but it seems that the WD MyBook Studio doesn't run properly without WD Manager, which currently isn't SL compatible. I use a WD MyBook Studio 1TB for Time Machine backups, and ever since installing SL (and thereby losing WD Manager), the drive will run at first but all of a sudden an hour or so into a session it spontaneously disconnects itself and disappears from the desktop, and OS X complains about not having ejected a drive properly.

It seems that the overzealous spindown/sleep function of the MyBook Studio needs WD Manager as some sort of keep-alive handler. Or something.

Having said that, WD Manager probably isn't involved when booting from the MyBook... it can't well be loaded at that stage.

nkh

Level 1

79 points

Sep 6, 2009 4:48 AM in response to Daniel Kiechle

I have 2 WD FW drives (My Book Premium; My Book Studio) with each holding a SuperDuper full backup of OS X 10.5.8. I've had no problem booting from either drives. However, I've removed WDDriveManager from MacHD as it appeared incompatible with OS X 10.6; the app would write a message to Console every 10 seconds --- no other negative aspects of the DriveManager apart from this continual updating on Console.

I've not as yet used SuperDuper to update my WD backups to OS X 10.6; the 10.5.8 updates continue to work.

What is the current advice with respect to updating these backup volumes to 10.6? Are the problems noted above discussed in greater detail elsewhere --- hopefully with good advice?

Sep 11, 2009 2:59 PM in response to Daniel Kiechle

I have the same problem, will not boot from Firewire (800) on a G-Tech Mini drive. It has booted once in 12 attempts which is quite confusing,. It simply does not see the drive out there at boot time. It still boots reliably using USB.

What does Apple say about this. They now sell these drives inline and in the store incidentally.

Oct 5, 2009 7:59 PM in response to alanbriggs

I went to a nearby Apple retail store and was sold Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 DVD-ROM, and a G-Tech G-RAID 2TB external hard drive. After installing 10.6 on the G-Tech drive connected via FireWire 800 to my 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro, the computer reboots but never gets to the 10.6 initial Welcome screen, instead just displays all grey pixels. This happened 3 times, even when I booted the MacBook Pro from the 10.6 DVD-ROM. Then I purchased from Apple a LaCie Rugged hard drive, connected it via FireWire 800, and that installation of 10.6 succeeded, rebooting to the Snow Leopard Welcome screen just fine. So, the problem is not with every external hard drive connected via FireWire 800, but, what I find bizarre, is that the inability to boot Snow Leopard from an external hard drive happens with some hard drives that Apple sells in its retail stores and on its online store. I may try installing 10.6 with the G-Tech drive connected via USB. Greg

emdebee

Level 1

0 points

Oct 16, 2009 11:38 PM in response to Greg Coats

I just installed the latest firmware update (v1.015) for my WD MyBook Studio II drives... now I can't boot from either of them via firewire (400 or 800) only via USB!!! This is definitely an issue with the WD firmware as I was able to boot via firewire before updating the firmware in both drives.

Oct 28, 2009 8:47 PM in response to emdebee

I have 4 FW 400 drives (connected with an FW 800 to FW 400 adapter cable) and 4 USB drives attached to my Intel iMac. The FW drives always booted this computer prior to upgrading to Snow Leopard. Now I can only boot from my USB drives. I cloned my internal drive to two of the FW drives with SuperDuper! 2.6.2 and they still would not boot.
This is obviously a bug in Snow Leopard and Apple needs to address it.

Nov 21, 2009 5:55 AM in response to Howard Ferguson

I do not seem to have the same problem on my MacBook Pro although it has failed to boot occasionally.

There is a solution that always works for me. You ere not going to like it. I do not like it either but so far it has not only always worked where there are no problems arising from doing this, so far.

After the drive does not boot, unplug and plug it back in right away and then it will boot immediately.

Sound like a timing problem or race condition in the programming which could easily be fixed by a retry strategy or through just changing for the timing responses.

I can not understand why Apple has not tested this basic capability properly, and fixed it already, and why the drive manufacturers and software developers seem to have so little interest in this problem.

I have contacted G-Tech and SuperDuper and all I hear is an "Really. It must be somebody else's fault and it is not really my problem". Well it is my problem and it was clearly a mistake to use your products for which there seems to be no interest in your supporting regarding their ongoing compatibility by working with others to resolve such issues.

PhilMilo

Level 1

0 points

Jan 4, 2010 7:22 AM in response to Daniel Kiechle

I installed Snow Leopard on a new partition and backed up with SuperDuper to a partition on my external OWC Mercury Elite AL Pro mini drive. It shows up fine under Firewire, SuperDuper backs up with no problem, but when I try to boot from the drive when connected by Firewire, it doesn't show up, even though it is chosen as the boot drive (partition) in System Preferences. Holding down the Option key on boot doesn't help, nor does turning the external drive off/on or unplugging/plugging in the drive. The same external drive works fine in all these cases when connected by USB. Sounds like a bug in Snow Leopard. Using USB to boot seems to be the only workaround until Apple figures out and corrects the bug in Snow Leopard.

Mar 8, 2010 4:52 PM in response to Daniel Kiechle

WOW fellas, this is a lot of work you've been doing and I appreciate all of it. I'm here after assuming I would be able to put together a great production package on an external drive and boot from it when I got a new machine. I haven't completely given up because everyone keeps telling me something different. My external drive is a Glyph PortaGig FW800 7200. it's got Tiger 10.4.11 and a full load of Audio apps and plugs including Pro-Tools, Logic, and Waves. I spent weeks tweaking getting everything working together and it's been working flawlessly from a G4 pwrBook, also with Tiger.

I guess I wasn't surprised when my new MacBook Pro with SL didn't recognize it in the system preferences Start Up menu, nor did it see it when booting with the option key held down. one apple rep first told me that SL doesn't boot from the System Menu and told me the option key was the only way to do it. then when I said that didn't work he "consulted" with a pro and got back on the phone saying Snow Leopard doesn't allow you to boot from another drive. I'll spare you the rest.

has anyone been successful booting Tiger from an intel Mac running SL?

Cannot boot Snow Leopard from external FireWire drive