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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

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...
 

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Scott

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.

November 26 2006 at 12:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ernie.

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.

October 26 2006 at 12:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jbelkin

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?

October 25 2006 at 11:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Michel

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.

October 25 2006 at 6:12 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kory Hearn

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

You could boot up in seconds!

October 25 2006 at 12:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Buthidae

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!

October 25 2006 at 12:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
topcat

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

October 25 2006 at 12:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bobby Koerper

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!

October 25 2006 at 12:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Riine

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

October 25 2006 at 12:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Eric

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.

October 25 2006 at 12:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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