Hard Drive Enclosure

[aitikin]

I have recently come into a hard drive enclosure and an extra hard drive. I decided it'd be pretty cool to have OSX86 on an external hard drive so I could use it anywhere I go (with SSE2 available). Then I thought I could install it through this method, just use Carbon Copy Cloner.

 

Now I have a backup of OSX86 and an install of OSX86. Back-up in the enclosure, regular copy on the internal. If I screw something up, I just go back to the back-up. Word of warning though, you need to format every partition (if you even bother with partitions) to HFS+. It won't be bootable otherwise (from my understanding, haven't tried myself).

 

Anybody else tried putting it on an external HD? All that you need is a bios update on most older computers with SSE2, or to activate USB storage device booting and change the order. I'm going to start using Grub again so I can just set it for Windows/OS X/Linux/External OS X. Thought this would be a good thing for people to try.

[maq]

I get a message about lack of kernel dependency, followed shortly thereafter by a kernel panic every time I try to boot from an external USB drive with any version of osx86..

 

I'll take a screenshot when I get a chance - you didn't have to do anything special to get it working?

[jfunk]

I recently encountered the same problem. I have an HP zv5240us (zv5000 series) laptop with a 60GB internal drive and a 250GB external drive. My partition setup is as follows:

 

Internal: 1. NTFS 49.93GB 2. Linux Swap 753MB 3. Linux (reiserfs) 5.224GB [contains Windows and Suse 9.3 operating systems]

 

External: 1. NTFS 209GB 2. Fat32 10GB 3. HPS+ 6GB 4. HPS+ 14GB [First two are storage, and last two were formatted for osx86]

 

The interesting part is that the chain0 loader did not detect osx86 on my external drive, nor does my laptop support USB booting (not even in an update). My solution? Acronis OS Selector (part of the Disk Director suite). I added the chain0 file to it's list of files and it automatically detected osx86 on my external. Now, it can detect it and run it at boot time. The only problem I have with it, is that I get the "restart your computer" error message, and when I do it in -v or -s modes, It cannot read my USB drive from that point on. If anyone has any solutions or ideas, please let me know! I'll keep looking in the meantime. I also hope this helps some dual-booters with their problems.

 

--Jeff

[aitikin]

you didn't have to do anything special to get it working?

 

I expected there to be a problem like that when I did it, but mine worked fine. Are you using 10.4.1 or .3? Mine is .3 and that might be part of the difference. Up until I tried this the only thing I've ever heard of Apple's booting off of on externals was FireWire, which is the case on regular Apple computers, so it may be that you need to work with 10.4.3 only. rumor has it that Apple is moving away from Firewire 400 altogether.

 

Make sure you don't have any non-Apple formatted partitions. I'm basing that information off of the third comment in this thread. Basically it says that if you have two partitions and one is FAT(16/32) and the other is HFS+, it won't be bootable.

[maq]

I tried it with 10.4.1, 10.4.3 8f1099, and 8f1111.. kernel panic every time. I can't detect the drive in VMWare to install it, so I just dd'd the image. I only had the single HFS+ partition on the drive. I guess I could try installing on the internal drive and cloning it over if you think that would make a difference.

[cyrana]

It wont boot on USB for me on any Intel system I've tried (ok, 2 on ICh6 and ICH7) But if I plug things into firewire and plug the same volume into a ppc mac, it boots up just fine. Maybe it is an x86 thing w/multiple partition types on the drive, I'll set it all to one partition and see how it goes.

[aitikin]

I guess I could try installing on the internal drive and cloning it over if you think that would make a difference.

 

I forgot to mention that's kind of what I did. I had the HD on my parents computer, installed OSX86, took the HD out and then put it in an enclosure. That might be what makes all the difference. I can boot it up in FW on my iBook, still has some errors we see in x86. I had to say, the fact that I could do it completely surprised me. I formatted all the partitions in the Disk Utility at boot up when it was in the computer. I'm working off of a Giga-Byte board, K8NSNXP-939 so maybe something in the bios is letting me do it? All I had to do was have it plugged in when mmy computer booted up and go into the bios and set it for USB mass storage as the primary boot option.