Can't boot with external firewire drive attached.

60wpm wrote:

Re: Comment above: "

the Recovery Disk Assistant does not create a new Recovery HD; it only copiesone that already exists. '

Who said it did? -- You?

No, you did. Several times.

So you finally admit that's correct. Great. End of story.

@s.mazzucato -- That's interesting (above), but who was trying to create a Lion Recovery Disk Assistant on an external drive?

Since this is a (nice) new thing, it's easy to understand the same confusion I had. It appears there are three things being talked about:

1. Lion Recovery on one's internal HD

2. Lion Recovery on an external HD

and, what I've always been talking about

3. An INTERNET Lion Recovery Disk Assistant (on a 2GB Flash drive).

Right links were provided, btw. Here again: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

As I previous quoted: " Lion Internet Recovery lets you start your Mac directly from Apple's Servers."

This link explains: " Lion Internet Recovery will download and start from a Recovery HD image."

With this INTERNET Lion Recovery Disk Assistant (on a 2GB Flash drive) no hard drive is needed or used: neither internal or external.

At least, as I've been saying, that has been my experience.

It's a very cool thing to have, btw, and I'd suggest it to all Lion users, since you can recover even if your hard drive fails.

@Pondini -- No, I never said that. I said NOTHING about trying to make a Recovery Hard Drive with my INTERNET Lion Recovery Disk Assistant.

I also, clearly, "admitted' to no such thing.

Maybe you should try to get more 'points' by being helpful rather that putting words in people's mouths and claiming they 'admitted' to something they did not.

{}

60wpm wrote:

. . .

and, what I've always been talking about

3. An INTERNET Lion Recovery Disk Assistant (on a 2GB Flash drive).

And what we keep trying to explain is, that's two different things: Internet Recovery is different from the Recovery Disk Assistant.

As I previous quoted: " Lion Internet Recovery lets you start your Mac directly from Apple's Servers."

This link explains: " Lion Internet Recovery will download and start from a Recovery HD image."

Yes, and the Recovery HD that creates is on your OSX volume only.

You need the separate Recovery Disk Assistant to copy that to another volume.

60wpm wrote:

. . .

INTERNET Lion Recovery Disk Assistant.

Again, there is no such thing.

There's Lion Internet Recovery

and there's Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

Yes, they are related, and the names are similar, but they are two different things.

s.mazzucato wrote:

I have an iMac 20 inch (mid-2007) running Lion 10.7.3. When the external drive, a WD My Passport Studio 1TB, is attached via the firewire connection, the iMac will not boot at all. It will be stuck at the white screen, if I disconnect the drive, the apple log appears and boot up continues normally. If I try using a USB cable, the problem does not exist, the computer boots normally.

FWIW, I have the exact same problem. A Mid-2007 iMac that won't boot over Firewire from a Western Digital external hard drive. That same HD will not boot a Late-2007 MacBook either. But note that it DOES boot my mid-2010 iMac. And like you, that same drive will boot all 3 of my Macs if connected via USB- though naturally very slowly compared to the Internal Hard drives.

Also note that 3 other Maxtor Firewire drives I own flawlessly boot all 3 of my Macs over Firewire. It's definitely a WD thing.

BTW- I'm running Snow Leopard on all three Macs, so as you've probably already realized this is not a Lion issue if that comes as any comfort.

I've done tons of testing, diagnostics, SMC resets, PRAM resets, etc. The bottom line is that something does not play nice between the Firewire chipset of those older Macs and the chipset in the WD external drives. FWIW, the Mid-2007 iMacs and Late-2007 MacBook all share the then-new Santa Rosa architecture, and probably share the same Firewire chipset- but just speculating there.

In any case, there seems to be nothing that can be done. I'm trying to decide whether to return the WD drive, or keep it but resigned that it will only boot via USB to 2 out of my 3 Macs.

Dave

As discussed in your other post, I'd suggest returning it and getting one that works w/o caveats.

Did you manage to solve booting from WD using firwire as i have the same problem as can boot from usb but not firwire