An open community 
of Macintosh users,
for Macintosh users.

FineTunedMac Dashboard widget now available! Download Here

Previous Thread
Next Thread
Print Thread
2.5" enclosures-which will boot Intel Macs?
#5760 11/11/09 10:26 PM
Joined: Sep 2009
OP Offline

Joined: Sep 2009
I've got 40 or 50 Macally PHR-250CC enclosures (These fit a ATA-6 drive & have FW400 and USB 2.0 interfaces). These have been superseded with PHRS-250cc, which fit SATA drives. We mainly use them for data backup, but I also used to rely on a few for bootable "save-your-behind" machine clones.
I haven't been able to get these newer enclosures to boot Intel Macs (or the older ones either) using either interface. I've formatted the drives in GUID, using either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner - cloned systems. I had previously enjoyed 3 years of being able to boot these external drives with FW400 to (10.4.11) G4 PPC or G5PPC Macs. Am I being thick, or are there other 2.5" enclosures that I should be using? Or is it the end of bootable mobile drive backups and I just haven't picked up on the fact?
I'd like to boot 10.5.8 or 10.6 Intel MacBookPro and iMac machines.

Re: 2.5" enclosures-which will boot Intel Macs?
crankyfranky #5762 11/11/09 11:19 PM
Joined: Aug 2009
Offline

Joined: Aug 2009
I still use "PHR" to describe my service drive tho it's gone through two upgrades from there since then. I never had a boot problem with it. Are you sure you are both formatting it correctly, AND partitioning it correctly?

Ideally, firewire and usb are both basically universal for both mounting and booting, but I've ran past at least two examples of where a bridge chipset needed a firmware update to boot the latest and greatest OS X at the time. I have no explanation for why this is, beyond a bug in the chipmaker's firmware. Apple basically wrote and maintains the FW standard so you'd expect them to take advantage of it to the letter and so failure to dot the i's and cross the t's in your firmware implementation would make a compatibility break most likely to affect a mac first.

I go against the grain and my service drive is partitioned APS (not GUID) but despite what apple tells you in numerous places, it boots intels fine. (tho their installers and firmware updaters throw FITS)

You do have to of course bless it, and the OS has to be intel compatible. 10.4 was never released as a universal installer. Early imacs, minis, and macbooks that shipped with 10.4 were using a custom intel build. So if you are using 10.4 then there's your problem. There is no universal 10.4 build. Requires specific restore disks too. 10.5 is UB. 10.6 is ... dunno what you'd call it? it's not UB, but in the other direction. Is there a name apple gives to code that's intel only? (besides maybe "modern" wink

If you want a HD that boots most modern macs, find a very recent mac pro that shipped with 10.5 and install 10.5 with that. Will may a little hacking to get the camera to work and the fans will probably go wild until you run the combo updater. Reason for mac pro is there's an unexplained KP when booting off a 10.5 installed by another model of mac to a new mac pro. I'm sure it's something stupid, but I've been unable to track it down.


I work for the Department of Redundancy Department

Moderated by  alternaut, cyn 

Link Copied to Clipboard
Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.4
(Release build 20200307)
Responsive Width:

PHP: 7.4.33 Page Time: 0.020s Queries: 18 (0.012s) Memory: 0.5730 MB (Peak: 0.6234 MB) Data Comp: Zlib Server Time: 2024-03-29 14:45:22 UTC
Valid HTML 5 and Valid CSS