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Boot from USB external HDD?


mikekbrad
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Hey, first time OSX86 user here, OSX user for about a year. I dual-boot between OS X and Windows XP on my MacBook, and now I wanted to install OS X on my desktop Win XP computer. It has a RAID setup so I figured I couldn't install it to the internal drives. I made a partition on my external USB drive, and went through the whole OS X installation, following this guide: http://dilnalomo.googlepages.com/xposx01 I think everything went well. However, I am having trouble figuring out how to boot into OS X. I have Acronis OS Selector, but it doesn't detect the external drive at boot. Likewise, I can't seem to find the external drive on the BIOS boot settings. My motherboard is an Intel D875-PBZ, which should support USB booting. I hope I am just missing something fairly obvious... it is possible to boot from a USB external hard drive, right?

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On a PC, booting from a USB external drive is usually a BIOS setting, at least it was on my board which is a D945 chipset board.

 

You might want to check to see if there is a newer BIOS for your board which has the ability to boot from the USB attached drive.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My friend had this problem on his dell laptop this week.

 

I think that when you format the drive go into the partition option and choose the options. You can choose between GUID type partition or master boot record (MBR) type. Choose MBR and then the laptop BIOS might boot into it. Don't know though you'll have to try it for yourself. But it was definitely stopping my friend from even booting into his internal drive.

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I recently bought a new 500GB WD external USB HDD, i partition 20GB out of it and installed 10.4.8. My dell 8600 inspiron has usb boot option in bios. Installation went well and when i reboot it got booted into mac but, i can has the welcome music and video is not working, i think i have to try and fix video problem, any suggestions?, but i think if you have usb boot option in bios it should work.

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