Booting Your Mac From An External FireWire Drive
October 11, 2008 – 5:55 am
I was sitting in the living room doing some work on my Macbook when I heard that infamous clicking sound coming from my wife’s Macbook. That clicking sound is the sound of a dying hard drive. Sure enough, a quick check of the hard drive using Apple’s Disk Utility confirmed my suspicion.
Fortunately, I regularly use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a complete clone of her drive. We will be going to Richmond this week so I can visit the Apple store and get a replacement hard drive but, in the meantime, she will want to use her computer. The solution is to boot from the firewire cloned drive.
Booting the system off an external hard drive that might have a backup or a pre-installed mac osx system designed for this purpose is a breeze but I thought I would review the steps. Simply plug the firewire drive into the Mac and power it up. As you power up your Mac, hold down the OPTION key, this will force the Mac to produce a list of available and valid system boot options, whether the valid system system is on an internal, a CD/DVD or an external device. From this list, you can select the correct drive by clicking the rightward arrow.
Another handy trick is to place your Mac into FireWire mode at startup, thus turning your Mac itself into an external firewire drive. To force the system into FireWire Disk mode, hold down the T key at startup. Once in FireWire Disk mode, you will see a FireWire Logo screensaver on the screen. Now you can plug the system into another Mac to test the hard drive.