I am trying to find one that actually says it on the tin, which is proving quite difficult.

Usb A External Hard Drive Mac OS X

There are plenty of reasons for booting from external volumes, whether its to troubleshoot problems, repair disks, partition, format everything, update, or even reinstall Mac OS X.

Well cover the two easiest ways to do this, during boot with the Mac Boot Manager, and also through System Preferences using the Startup Disk selection tool.

Any Mac running Lion (10.7) or newer will also be able to use the Boot Manager to startup from the Recovery partition.

In this screen shot example, the right-most orange boot drive is a USB flash disk.

Usb A External Hard Drive Download From The

This is fairly uncommon these days, but it was the primary method of accessing recovery partitions before Mac OS X became a download from the App Store, and before USB installer drives became more common.

The only exception is with target disk mode, which requires a different sequence to use.

This means that if the chosen startup volume has been disconnected from the Mac, on the next reboot a blinking question mark may appear, because the set startup disk is no longer visible.

If that blinking question mark is persistent, that can be easily remedied by holding down the OPTION key, selecting the normal Macintosh HD boot volume at startup as outlined above, and then going back to Startup Disk in System Preferences to choose the proper MacOS or Mac OS X startup volume again.

When it works, it works great But the problem I am fighting is when I start the Mac, the external drive does not light up and is not recognized causing my Mac to boot into recovery mode.

If I unplugplug the external drive a few times, it is eventually powered and recognized and then it boots.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can convince the Mac to see the drive, recognize it, and boot from it without my having to disconnect reconnect the thunderbolt cable multiple times.

Im thinking about buying a refurbished MacBook Pro made in 2013, but I dont know whether it was made before or after they canceled this type of retro-compatibility.

Ive tried several times to boot off my external drive I select it and then keep getting the folder worn Question mark.

The first time I got a circle with a diagonal line through it on the screen, after I saw the apple, and the spinner was spinning below the circle.

A friend told me to try restarting with the option function, which now brings up the error message You need to restart your computer every single time.

I tried suggestions above including D, Apple-R, option, and C.

Was trying to do a clean install of Yosemite but got a message somewhere along the lines of this is not a supported install of the operating system.

Went to the App Store and was able to download Yosemite which was installed on the external drive.

So far everything is working, not sure what happened but now I am going to have a main boot drive along side an external boot drive.

I will be very happy (and less broke) if I can just yank out the drive from my old mbp, put it in a case, plug it in via USB, boot from it, and run my older software.

It wont allow repair of permissions.

Im stuck. I did do a new image of each partition to an external drive.

What do you recommend I do not want to loose all the info on the drive.

I am considering getting Carbon Copy and they insisted that I get an external drive that is rebootable.

Usb A External Hard Drive For Mac