Boot your PowerPC Mac from an external USB drive

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.

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.

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?

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.

I wonder if this would work on an 8GB nano?

You could boot up in seconds!

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!

been doing this for ages! I thought this was common knowledge! last year i imaged a number of macs friom my usb hard drive.

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!

This is awesome news as I thought before this was only available to iPods that had firewire. I'm rejoicing.

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.