How do I boot from cd with lion on new Mac Mini

Question

JeffCMKRNL Author

Level 1

31 points

How do I boot from cd with lion on new Mac Mini

Hello,

I just bought new Mac Mini with Lion.

I have an external optical drive connected via Firewire.

I can mount bootable disks on optical drive, to see contentents just fine.

I have bootable volume in drive which is readable, but restarting with "C" key held down does not boot off of optical drive.

Holding option key down while rebooting shows local HD plus a bootable partition I have on another external firewire HD, but it does not show bootable Optical volumes on Firewire External optical media.

Why can't I boot from optical media.

Jeff

Dual PowerMAC G5, G5 Mac Mini, CoreDuo MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.3), If only Mac were based on VMS instead of mach kernel

Posted on Oct 15, 2011 9:39 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 15, 2011 11:26 PM in response to JeffCMKRNL

why are you trying to boot from the CD?

to reinstall lion or get in the recovery partition hold CMD-R while rebooting.

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Answer 2

JeffCMKRNL Author

Level 1

31 points

Oct 16, 2011 8:26 AM in response to TheSmokeMonster

It is not a Lion CD, nor am I trying to recover.

I am trying to boot from a Coriollis iPartition CD.

I need to partition my one existing 493 GB boot partition to a 120 GB Boot partition and a 370 GB data partition.

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Answer 3

JeffCMKRNL Author

Level 1

31 points

Oct 16, 2011 9:21 AM in response to JeffCMKRNL

Additional information:

I also tred going to the System Preferences -> Startup Disk.

My mounted Bootable CD ROM (Coriollis Bootable iPartition disk) was not listed.

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Answer 4

Tony T1

Level 6

10,232 points

Oct 16, 2011 9:30 AM in response to JeffCMKRNL

JeffCMKRNL wrote:

I need to partition my one existing 493 GB boot partition to a 120 GB Boot partition and a 370 GB data partition.

Can't Disk Utility do this for you?

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Answer 5

JeffCMKRNL Author

Level 1

31 points

Oct 16, 2011 9:40 AM in response to Tony T1

The disk utility can't do this without loosing all the data on my boot partition.

iPartition can shrink and split an existing partition as long as there is sufficient free space.

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Answer 6

Tony T1

Level 6

10,232 points

Oct 16, 2011 12:20 PM in response to JeffCMKRNL

JeffCMKRNL wrote:

The disk utility can't do this without loosing all the data on my boot partition.

Then you need to partition a MBR, correct?

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Answer 7

Tony T1

Level 6

10,232 points

Oct 16, 2011 12:46 PM in response to JeffCMKRNL

Try burning the Coriollis CD to a USB stick, and then boot from the USB:

In Disk Utility, select the the Coriollis CD in the sidebar, then click the Restore button in the main part of the window.
Drag the the Coriollis CD icon into the Source field on the right.
Connect to your Mac the flash drive you want to use for your bootable Coriollis USB. The USB drive must be formatted with a GUID partition map.
In Disk Utility, find this destination drive in the sidebar and then drag it into the Destination field on the right.
Click Restore.

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Answer 8

JeffCMKRNL Author

Level 1

31 points

Mar 25, 2012 11:48 AM in response to Tony T1

Thank you. I was able to make a bootable USB flash of my Coriolis CD, but that is a workaround to my problem.

Why cant I boot from a bootable CD?

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Answer 9

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Mar 25, 2012 1:30 PM in response to JeffCMKRNL

I have an external optical drive connected via Firewire.

My understanding is that some brands of external FireWire optical drives are not capable of booting a Mac, even though they can read and burn discs normally. You might try to get further info on your particular model.

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