Filed under: How-tos, Tips and tricks, Troubleshooting
Boot your PowerPC Mac from an external USB drive
I hadn't bothered even trying this before because all avenues pointed to the fact that it shouldn't/wouldn't work - but someone else did the obvious and simple thing and now we can all benefit from the result without nagging doubts. Want to boot your PowerPC Mac from an external USB 2.0 drive? Piece of cake! Clone your current system over to the external drive (or install a shiny new system if you prefer), restart while holding down the Option key to get into the boot manager and select that external drive as your startup disk. Yes, that's right - it's the same process you'd use to boot from a Firewire drive. I don't have a USB 2.0-enabled Mac handy at the moment to test this with, but I'll take the MacOSXHintster's word for it since a few commenters there also agree. The consensus is that it's slow as molasses but it does actually work. No Open Firmware voodoo required. Score: Laurie - 0 | Blatantly obvious solution - 1
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Michael said 11:28AM on 10-25-2006
Wow... Hard to believe that nobody tried this before.
Ah well, I guess it's a good thing!
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Twist said 11:43AM on 10-25-2006
Man if I knew this tip would be so popular I would have submitted it years ago when I booted a friends PowerMac G4 Dual 533 MHz running OS 9 off of a USB Zip drive when the hard drive inside of it went bad.
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twain said 11:45AM on 10-25-2006
so, they did it. I did it to, works. GREAT!
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robdew said 12:05PM on 10-25-2006
I seem to recall that on PowerPC Macs, the installer will not install a system to a USB drive. The message is very explicit, like "You can't install to this drive because you can't boot from it."
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Eric said 12:09PM on 10-25-2006
I've seen this floating around a few places on the web, but I still don't understand: is this possible on Intel Macs? If so, any recommendations on backup/cloning utilities and guides? Thanks.
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Riine said 12:18PM on 10-25-2006
This is awesome news as I thought before this was only available to iPods that had firewire. I'm rejoicing.
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bobby Koerper said 12:22PM on 10-25-2006
it's not just nice if you want to have another environment to work, you can also use this in times of crisis, ie: data corruption. say your computer wont boot due to a dying hard drive, just install on the usb disk and start recovering the data from that old drive!
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harma41 said 12:26PM on 10-25-2006
I am not being a jerk, but how is this news in 2006, and where have you foks been. I was doing that with usb 1.1 ever since the bondi blue imac and b&w G3s came out. And 2.0 works just the same, except as fast as firewire. I work for an edu, and you had to do something to clone all of those lab workstations.
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Buthidae said 12:41PM on 10-25-2006
That works?! I, like robdew, have tried to install an OS X system to a USB drive, and I'm been plainly told "You can't install a system to this drive because you can't boot from it"!
Well, good to know!
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Kory said 12:44PM on 10-25-2006
I wonder if this would work on an 8GB nano?
You could boot up in seconds!
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TC said 1:48PM on 10-25-2006
been doing this for ages! I thought this was common knowledge! last year i imaged a number of macs friom my usb hard drive.
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Gord Locke said 4:40PM on 10-25-2006
By the way, this should also work (in theory) for Macs that are USB 1.1 enabled. But not Macs that are limited to USB 1.0, such as the original Bondi blue iMac. Of course, it would be slower than whale crap for OS X especially, but I have booted OS 9 volumes in this way, including from Zip disks.
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michel said 6:13PM on 10-25-2006
hé???
all mac can boot usb or firewire (and even network setup) from ages.
I use it sometimes to test some stuff or restore a broken mac for my job.
nothing new here...
like others people I believed _Everyone_ knew that or thought it could logically works .
sorry.
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jbelkin said 11:16PM on 10-25-2006
Can someone verify. I though non Intel macs could only boot up off firewire (I tried to boot off a backup USB drive but got a kernal panic). I heard that only Intel macs could boot off of USB (and not firewire) - true, false?
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ipodrulz said 12:22AM on 10-26-2006
Wondering if this would work if I got an exact image of Ubuntu.. I really want to try ubuntu nativly.. but i don't have enough hard drive space.
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Scott said 12:40PM on 11-26-2006
Posted at 12:07PM on Oct 25th 2006 by harma41"
[i]"I am not being a jerk, but how is this news in 2006, and where have you foks been."[/i]
From here on out, I vote that we first check with harma41 to make sure each TUAC tip is not known by him, and therefore probably not known by most people.
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