January 10, 2005
Of cloned disks and USB (not) booting on a Mac
My weekend of disk shuffling is at an end, but alas it seems it was all for nothing. Attempts to convince the Mac to boot from my freshly-cloned external USB disk consistently fail.
I tried three ways to clone my laptop's hard disk to the USB drive:
Unfortunately, CarbonCopyCloner failed first time round because I deleted some files while it was cloning. Second time round, I wasn't able to boot off the disk so I tried another package.
IMsafe wasn't successful - it crashed first time I tried to copy, which left me feeling unwilling to try it again.
asr, a built-in utility "Apple Software Restore", is designed to efficiently copy disk images onto volumes and clone volumes. I tried it as follows:
asr -source / -target /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD\ 1 -erase
Unfortunately, the resultant cloned disk still won't boot. When I select the USB drive at boot (by holding down the ALT/option key) and then review the console boot messages (by holding down the Apple/command and v keys), I see errors in talking to the USB drive (MakeDevice error setting address), followed by rather plaintive "Still waiting for root device" messages as it fails to boot.
In fairness, this USB drive is kinda old, but still... this sucks. I'm guessing either something's screwed up with my use of asr, or the drive simply doesn't support booting. It takes about four hours to create the clone, so I think I'll give up for now and check out the prices of fast external firewire disks.
Meanwhile, at least I have an identical copy of my hard drive.