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

Yes I am and so is Apple.

The only option is IF you had the same model, or one that is a very similar model with basically the same hardware, that originally came with Mt Lion you could clone that drive and is should boot on the new Retina models.

One such Mac was the Late 2013 iMac models. Released at the same time as Mavericks and the newest Retina Macbook Pro's. Those iMacs came with a Special build of Mt Lion 10.8.4 (right not even the most current version of Mt Lion) and they have basically the same hardware as the Retina models. Intel Haswell CPU and accompanying chipset and I think similar GPU.

So if you could lay your hands on one of them or just a clone of the HDD from when the originally included Mt Lion version was installed it should work on the new Retina models. But that is just my Assumption as I have never tried it.

brynden29 wrote:

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?

Also the Mid 2013 Macbook Air models came with Mt Lion and should work to boot your Late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina screen. Same hardware except for the discrete GPU.

brynden29 wrote:

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?

nbar do you know what do do about my imac?

Absolutely nothing given you are neither the OP nor have you been involved in this thread. If you have an issue with your machine, start a new thread. Cheers.

Update to this thread on my try, with the modification on the file "PlatformSupport.plist" of Mac 10.8.5, it does not work, but with a little further step "booting the system forever" instead of that prohibiting icon. I will stop to use these new Mac book to run Mac 10.8.5.

I could understand partially of Apple's policy, but not all of them. I think in the world there are still a lot of guys using 10.8.x, so Apple could think of them and support them to buy new machines 😁

We use Office 2010 for mac and the lync does not work properly with our GAL.

LowLuster, I tried restoring to a time machine backup of mountain lion from a late 2013 Air and I got an error. Should I try to clone the drive instead of restoring the backup?

I hope you meant to type Office 2011 for Mac. If not and you meant Office 2008 then you can upgrade office to 2011.

brynden29 wrote:

We use Office 2010 for mac and the lync does not work properly with our GAL.

There is no Late 2013 Air. The last model release of the Air was Mid 2013 and it has the Haswell CPU and same chipset. But it might be because of No Discrete GPU drivers as they weren't needed for the Air model. You could try a clone. You can't Restore a Time Machine backup from an older version of OS X over a newer version of OS X.

You would first need to Repartition the drive as One partition to remove all traces of Mavericks and the Mavericks recovery HD files. But then it still might not work because of the GPU drivers are missing or it just won't work Period.

brynden29 wrote:

LowLuster, I tried restoring to a time machine backup of mountain lion from a late 2013 Air and I got an error. Should I try to clone the drive instead of restoring the backup?

Sorry, yes, 2011. The problem is, we are trying to use macs in a PC environment. If I install lync 2011 on mountain lion it works perfectly. If I install it on mavericks it does not sync with the GAL and you can't search for people's names.

Check with Lync for an update for Mavericks.

Or just install Windows on your Mac.

Look here. Posted Dec. 2013.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36517

Thanks for the link, unfortunately it did not solve the issue. Lync still does not populate people's names when searching. I guess I can look around for a fix since I can't put Mountain Lion on this Macbook Pro.

LowLuster wrote:

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.

That cannot be true. I successfully installed Snow Leopard on a late 2011 MBP from a Snow Leopard OSX created on a 2010 MBP.

There may be a dependency based on the given OSX version.

Ciao.

To re-iterate my comment since it keeps coming up; the external drive has the latest version of Mavericks installed; at the time of this writing, that is 10.9 (no further suffix). I'm hoping the 10.9.1 update fixes the issue (as noted by nbar above).

Coreworksnet - this is my issue exaclty. No matter what I do I can not get my brand new Mac Pro 15" retina to boot from a USB device. I am now in the process of cloning my internal drive to an external USB drive. If it still doesn't boot to the USB after this I might throw this thing out the window.