Filed under: Hardware, OS, Peripherals, Software
Intel Macs can boot from USB drives
Last week Dan posted about the new
complications of Intel OS X drives not being bootable on PowerPC Macs, and vice-versa. The report came from Jon 'Wolf'
Rentzsch, who recently updated the originating
post with some specifics about booting and partition schemes, with one fairly positive detail: Intel based Macs can
boot from USB2 drives. While many in the Mac community prefer FireWire over USB2 for various reasons, this will nevertheless open the doors for OS X to be bootable from more external hard drives. What are the chances I can bring a slimmed down OS X installation along with me on a 2 or 4 GB USB2 flash drive? I guess a geek can dream.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
fra said 5:15PM on 2-08-2006
I'm sure we could see a lite version of OSX as we have seen with Windows (WindowsXP stripped of anything... annoying so, it went from around 700MB cd to 300MB on a cd), OSX live?
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James said 5:19PM on 2-08-2006
Unless you can disable swap, or redirect it to the internal drive, you really wouldn't want to run OS X off a flash drive. Not only will it be very slow, but the repeated writes that the swapfile requires will run up against a flash drive's MTBF relatively quickly. There are filesystems you can use which queue system writes up until the end of your session, at which point it writes the final state to disk - I'd want some kind of support for that if I were going to do this.
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Oliver said 5:27PM on 2-08-2006
The availability of the MacBook Pro in the Apple Online Store has been changed from February to 3-4 weeks. Just thought some people might like to know.
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LD said 5:34PM on 2-08-2006
Boot to GRUB on the USB and point it to a partition on the hard drive for a dual boot perhaps?
Seems plausible.
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alex said 5:41PM on 2-08-2006
http://www.charlessoft.com, lets you create a 700mb os X boot. A Tiger beta is out to testers(i have a copy), but it's only PPC for the moment. So, it is possible, but the Intel version will require time and work.
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Thomas said 5:42PM on 2-08-2006
OSX via an iPod Shuffle. SWEET
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ChillyWilly said 7:08PM on 2-08-2006
And yet another nail in the coffin for firewire, as far as Apple is concerned. I know these new Macs have firewire, but the move towards USB-only seems pretty evident.
I assume you can still boot from firewire with the new Intel iMacs.
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Peter said 7:37PM on 2-08-2006
Presumably it would be possibly to boot Windows on the new MBPs from the USB too?
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Lee said 10:11PM on 2-08-2006
It never ceases to amaze me how many folks believe the "Apple is going to do away with firewire" myth.
1- That was for iPods ONLY. to cut the unit manufacturing costs on a $300 device.
2- It would orphan MILLIONS of DV cams that are firewire out. Last I checked most of the new ones are STILL firewire. Can you say iMovie/Final Cut??
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Scott said 7:12AM on 2-09-2006
Besides my HP ZD7000 laptop has firewire. Firewire will be around for a while...still the best way to hook up a video camera.
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Geeks Are Sexy said 7:12AM on 2-09-2006
Hey, a slimmed down version of OsX running on a USB key would surely be something wonderfull for techies.. I know that similar installation for windows do wonders..
Kiltak
[Geeks Are Sexy] Tech. News
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com
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Apple Tech said 9:23AM on 2-09-2006
Booting from USB isn't really that amazing. Now if target disk mode would work on either USB or Firewire that would be excellent. Target disk mode makes imaging machines a breeze and the problem with usb is that the chip is host controlled so maybe they could offload that onto EFI. Any news on that development?
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Eli said 10:33AM on 2-09-2006
Most people who knock FireWire do so because they don't understand why it's better than USB2 in many applications. Here's a good rundown for those who don't "get it":
http://www.dv-gear.com/digital-video-capture-card/firewire-vs-usb.htm
I'd rather boot off FireWire.
But flexibility is nice, so hooray for the new Macs ability to boot from either.
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Navypoo said 3:54PM on 2-09-2006
I thought it was *impossible* to boot from USB because of technial limitations.
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RPlatt said 7:26PM on 2-09-2006
For theose that may be interested, the iMac Intel Core Duo will boot to an external USB hard drive. I'm using a 3.5" External SATA Hard Drive Enclosure (USB 2.0) that I cloned from one of my external Firewire hard drives. Only the iMac Intel Core Duo version of OSX will boot. Intuitively, the USB drive seems just as fast as any of my Firewire drives.
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Alexander said 9:26PM on 2-09-2006
There already a a bootable thumbdrive. And it's 1GB of Firewire. The ultimate system maintenance hardware. Micromat Prot?
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Alexander said 9:28PM on 2-09-2006
Apparently HTML code can't be used when linking.. http://micromat.com/protege/protege_intro.html
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Mr. J Bauer said 7:00AM on 2-10-2006
FireWire is living! Think of all the DV-Cams, and Audio-Interfaces via. FW.
I don't mind if most peripherials are usb2 because then firewire is free for the important things like low latency audio editing and dv-cams (or hdv-cams:)
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