It used to be the case that only Intel Macs were able to boot from
USB 2.0 drives while older PowerPC Macs would only boot from external
firewire drives.
However, even that limitation is not the case anymore:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061017084322177
Easily boot from USB 2.0 drives on PowerPC Macs
Tue, Oct 24 '06 at 7:30AM PDT • Submitted by kidzmatter2me
This isn't so much a hint as much as a discovery, but it could be
useful to someone. This hint talks about getting a PowerPC Mac to
start from a USB 2.0 drive, but it involves messing around with the
system's NVRAM, which can be a complicated thing to do.
But today, I tried something new. I backed up my internal drive to
an external USB 2.0 drive using SuperDuper! (a great application,
by the way). Today, just for fun, I rebooted my PowerBook G4 with
the USB drive connected while holding the option key to load the
boot drive selection menu. It showed my internal drive as well as
my external backup drive as valid boot drives, so I chose the
external drive. OS X booted successfully off of the external drive,
albeit slowly. But for recovery purposes, this could be invaluable.
My system is running 10.4.8, so I'm not sure if this is a 10.4.8
feature, a SuperDuper! related thing, or if it has to do with some
other factor, but it works, and that's all I care about.
Useful to know.
:-)
-Mart
On 30/08/2007, at 5:58 PM, Robert Howells wrote:
On 30 Aug 2007, at 5:11pm, Robert Howells wrote:
Would that have been a USB2 only unit ?
It would be good for data storage
but you can only boot from firewire externally .
I've got a little Western Digital 160 usb2 Passport PocketDrive
with a copy of OS X on it and it boots my MacBook, albeit a little
slower than native on the machine.
Reg
So we live to learn !
I will have to pass that bit back to one of the Guru's I extract
info from .
In practical terms USB2 for Mac is of course found to be slower
that Firewire .
Bob
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