Last night, I connected my external USB 300GB drive to my macbook, as I
figured I would download and install a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner. I wnet
though and read probably 85-90 percent of the documentation that comes with
the app. Following the directions, I got the internal Macintosh HD volume
correctly cloned, by the looks of it. I did make sure to partition the
external drive with the guid scheme, 1 partition, mac extended journaled.
This is precisely what the help files said to do.
My copy of Snow Leopard definitely! sees that OSX 10.6.8 is on the external
drive, and when I look in my Finder, everything seems to be properly intact.
The bottom line is, the clone seemed to work perfectly. Now, here's the
catch though.
When I go to system preferences, then to startup disk, I definitely do see
both volumes as startup disks. However, if I try to set the startup disk to
my rescue volume, which by the way, I did title that volume as "Rescue"...
If I then hit restart, the system boots perfectly, but looking under the
Apple Menu at About this Mac, I notice that it says the startup disk is
Macintosh HD, not! Rescue. This leads me to think it's still! somehow
booting from the internal drive, not from my external rescue disk. I even
with sighted help, hit the option key and held it down at startup, and
tabbed to the rescue volume, and then hit return.
Just to really! verify a test if I was booted to the external drive but
getting a false reporting, on the supposed external startup disk, I went
into Text Edit, and created a file called integrity.txt. In this file,
which by the way, I saved in my Documents folder, I simply just wrote:
"This is a test." Once the file was correctly saved, I went back to system
prefs, startup disk, and switched it back to the internal Macintosh HD
volume. I then restarted, and disconnected the external drive from the USB
port.
Once booted, I went to the documents folder. Sure enough, there was my
integrity.txt file. That tells me I saved it on the internal volume, which
means I was definitely not booted to the external drive. Had I been, that
file now would not have shown up. So, I am totally perplexed. The
documentation states I believe it's in the section about preparing your
backup which is underneath the getting started section, that Western Digital
drives with enclosures are known to do this, and not boot. My drive is not
in an enclosure, for one thing, and for two, it states that if you're on a
PPC, you will not be able to boot from USB. This isn't the case for me
either, as I have a mid 2010 13 inch stocked white polli-carbon macbook
which came shipped with Snow Leopard. I made at that time nor now
absolutely no customizations. This is totally a stocked system in ment tip
top condition.
When I looked past the presets in CCC, where I had it said to temporarily
archive etc. just as the docs advised to do, I saw no errors the whole way
through the cloning process that would indicate that the volume would not be
bootable.
So, yeah, I don't know if the Efi is just not correctly seeing things, or
what the heck the deal is. I can put a bootable OSX DVD in my drive, and at
start up hold down the C key, and that works great! I also have another
external drive, which has an installation of Lion on it. If I plug that in,
I can either go to the boot menu, with the option key at startup, and boot
to it fine, or I can switch over to it through system prefs, and that, too
works fine. I've tried both USB ports as well, just in case one was falty
somehow, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The two ports are working
properly. I've also repaired permissions on the external disk with disk
utility, and even have done a disk repair on the volume. That did no good
either.
I'm almost at the point of firing off an e-mail to tech support, but I
wanted first to see if any of you had any ideas.
Both the drives I mentioned in this message that were external are both
Seagate drives. Neither of them have enclosures.
Thanks for any help.
Chris.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
