Boot Drive Selection Question????? UPDATED

[harcosparky]

This is a DUH! question.


Trying to boot off an external firewire drive attached to a 24" iMac.

I go to SYS PREF and select the Firewire drive to start off and restart but it continues to boot off internal drive.

What is the key I press at power up to allow me to select the drive from the keyboard?????

I should know this, but I forgot.

I am using a WIRELESS keyboard, is that an issue???

Thanks!!!

 

[gr8tfly]

It's the "option" key you want.

It should work with the BT keyboard, provided it's been paired ok.

 

[harcosparky]

OK ... now the issue is becoming clearer.

The OPTION kew is/was working with BT

The problem in reality became that the Firewire Drive was not showing up, only the internal maid HDD showed up when holding the Option key down.

However the FW drive showed up on the desktop of Leopard and was an option in the " Startup Disk " in SysPref.

Now to get it working I have to hold down the Option Key, and then disconnect and reconnect the FW drive before it will show up as an option.

This is with using the FW800 port.

I have yet to try it with FW400 or USB

The FW Drive is a Western Digital Passport Studio Edition with a 500GB drive.

My plan was to get it working nicely then tear it apart and put a 1TB drive in the enclosure.

 

[Hellhammer]

Try with USB. Are you sure the backup is bootable? Moreover, some HDs are not bootable with Macs

 

[harcosparky]

Try with USB. Are you sure the backup is bootable? Moreover, some HDs are not bootable with Macs

It's not so much a backup as a fresh install of SL 10.6

It's bootable as I am running from it right now.

The only issue is it will not show up in the " Boot Drive Selection " ( accessed holding down OPTION key at power up ) process unless it is disconnected and then reconnected.

 

[harcosparky]

So I have given up on the FW drive option.

Running on USB now.

Using a Black Widow Dual Drive Docking Station.

I am using a WD Caviar Black 1.0 TB 3.5" HDD for the system.

It has 32 MB Cache / 7200 RPM

Even running it through the USB dock the system *seems* faster then the internal HDD in the 24" iMac. That internal drive is relatively new, replaced by Apple a few months ago. On that drive I see lots of spinning beach balls from time to time. So far with this one that is not the case.

I'd love to open up the iMac and put the Caviar Black drive inside, but right now I don't have a place clean enough ( DUST FREE ) to safely do the job.

I'll run this way for a week or two and see how things go.