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Cannot boot up from external with Snow Leopard installed

I've got an iMac Intel Core 2 Duo running Tiger 10.4.11.

I've successfully installed Snow Leopard 10.6.3 onto an external drive (or so the screen said).

My mac recognizes the external drive as a start-up disk and allows me to select it as such. But upon restart, machine comes up in Tiger.

My external drive is brand new, OWC Mercury Elite AL Pro using a fire-wire connection. After installation but two failed attempts at start-up, I ran first aid on the external and no repairs were necessary. Using System Prefs I selected the external as my start-up disk, hit Re-start, but machine still restarts from Tiger.

The only other piece of information that may be vital, that I can think of, is that I misunderstood the "Mac readiness" of the drive when I took it out of the box. I first erased it (unnecessarily). Then I discovered this mistake, and made a point to re-format it using the GUID partition setting. Computer claimed that installation was successful upon installing Snow Leopard.

But now, machine will not start up in Snow Leopard.

iMac (20-inch Mid 2007), Mac OS X (10.4.11), 20-inch, 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Posted on Mar 14, 2012 4:34 PM

18 replies

Mar 15, 2012 1:37 PM in response to Ernie Centofanti

Update. I am now up and running on Snow Leopard, having booted from my external. Quite a bit of stuff to figure out here, including accessing the stuff on my older, hard drive. Apparently, I can just fine, except that I've created a newer, separate account and the two are distinct.

One pleasant surprise was that my Quark XPress v6.0 can run on Snow Leopard...I'd assumed it could not. Also, it looks like I just may be able to get my Photoshop 7.0 up and running as well. But those are issues for another post and another time.

One quick question: Is there a way to import all my Safari bookmarks from Tiger into Snow Leopard?

BDAqua

Level 10

239,369 points

Mar 15, 2012 1:42 PM in response to Ernie Centofanti

Well, the best/easiest way would've been to use Setup Assistant/Migration Assistant on very 1st boot of the new Install, right after butting some info in... may want to consider starting over???

Limnos

Level 10

411,247 points

Mar 15, 2012 3:03 PM in response to Ernie Centofanti

Mac OS X 10.5, 10.6: How to use Migration Assistant to transfer files from another Mac - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3322 but as BDAqua observes, this is really intended to be done with a fresh, new computer type arrangement.

Cannot boot up from external with Snow Leopard installed