Late 2013 13 inch macbook pro will not boot from bootable external hard drive

More likely it is a problem of the operating system on the disk being too old to boot the MBP.

Allan

Allan Eckert wrote:

More likely it is a problem of the operating system on the disk being too old to boot the MBP.

Allan

Had that been the case, according to the original poster, the disk would not have booted his/her "other Macs (boot fine) with this drive"

I had the same problem a few days ago. What I had to do to fix it was to restart my Mavericks Macbook Pro via an old disk image of the OS X Snow Leopard installation disk (10.6.3) and repair my Mavericks Macbook Pro installation disk via its' (Snow Leopard's) Disk Utility. Upon normal restart Mavericks has been running sweet since and I am able to boot from the same external clones that were refused earlier.

Go Figure!

Yes it would if they are older to match the older version of OS X

Sorry Allan, you have lost me a bit there. What do you mean?

Off the top of my head:

• What OS are you trying to boot? If OS X, what version?
• Is the external drive getting enough power? Does it have an external power supply or just USB?
• Is it plugged directly into a USB port on your Mac, or are you trying to run it through a hub first? Have you tried another port?
• Are you selecting the USB Disk at boot by holding alt, or are you using something like rEFIt? Is it mounting with the correct name?

If none of that helps I would need to know more about the 'other macs' that successfully booted from the USB drive... along with more info on what you're trying to accomplish

ViShVa wrote:

Sorry Allan, you have lost me a bit there. What do you mean?

My 2011 MBP came with SL, and cannot boot any earlier OSX than SL.

Current MBP shipping with Mavericks cannot boot with earlier than Mavericks.

If the OP's other Macs came with the OSX on the external or an earlier version of OSX, they can boot from that OSX. The fact the OP has the external drive prepared suggests it does not have Mavericks on it but ML or earlier.

My boot from Snow Leopard to repair my Mavericks drive was not a full SL install but from a disk image, on a 10GB hard drive partition of an external USB drive, of the OS X 10.6.3 (Snow Leopard) DVD disk that I had bought retail. It is equivalent to a copy of the "Install OS X Mavericks.dmg" that one downloads, and hopefully, saves.

I'm having the exact same issue, and I have the latest version of Mavericks installed on the external/emergency drive. It shows as bootable in the Startup Disk preference pane as well as when you hold down the option key during startup. However, when the startup process begins, I get the "slash circle" telling me it will not boot from said drive.

This is exactly same issue as mine on my new two macbook pro(one 13' and one 15', late 2013). I created an USB(8G) bootable mavericks installation image based on the latest mavericks download from apple store.

This USB works very well on my old (early/mid 2013 macbook pro) and I have installed successfully on them already.

I am guessing this new macbook pro hides something?

BTW, as another threads mention, the new macbook pro does not support mountain lion(10.8.5) any more as the driver issue.

We do need to use more and more macbook for our developers. Who can help? Appreciate!

someone is pointing out this might be an issue in mavericks download from the lastest appstore, which includes an old PlatformSupport.plist. This is interesting that one in the macbook pro(late 2013) has no issue. Apparently Apple wants to sell Macbook with higher priority than supporting.

The same reason for booting mountain lion??? I am going to try.

I am having the same issue, how van I get my brand new pro to boot to a USB drive?

If you have a Clone of the internal drive on an external I'm pretty sure the computer will boot from it. No new model Mac can boot from an External drive that has an Older version of OS X on it or even the same version of OS X made on an older Mac. All new Mac models have a special build of the current OS X version that contains the proper driver package for the newer hardware. No other version of OS X has that driver package for the new hardware not even the same version of OS X made from an Older Mac computer.

brynden29 wrote:

I am having the same issue, how van I get my brand new pro to boot to a USB drive?

So here's the problem. Mavericks does not work in our corporate environment and I need to put mountain lion on it. Are you saying there is no way for me to do this?

Yes. That is correct.

It has always been Apple's policy that a Mac can't run an older version of the operating system then the one it shipped with.

Exactly what is preventing your company from using Mavericks?

Allan

Here is the issue. The computer model you have currently houses a special build of Mavericks which is OEM and a step ahead of the App Store OS X image. This will be addressed in 10.9.1