Booting 2010 Mac Pro from external drive?

[Garnick]

Being a new poster, although certainly not 'new' to this forum, I'm almost certain I've seen this issue covered. However, I can't seem to find that thread now, so I will risk the ire of the group by asking one more time.

My setup includes two bootable clones of my Sys and Apps drive as backups, one being an external drive from which I can boot my PPC G5 if necessary. In a couple of weeks I will be purchasing a 3.2GHz Mac Pro refurb. Obviously a huge upgrade and one that has been needed for far too long. My business relies on the G5 in various ways everyday, and the Mac Pro will of course be lightening fast in comparison.

Now to my question, finally. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the Mac Pro cannot be booted from an external drive. I hope I'm wrong, since I'll be loading up the Mac Pro with drives(5 total) and one bootable external HDD as well if that will work.

Thanks in advance for any advice you folks can offer.

 

[PowerPCMacMan]

Hi,

You wrote: "Now to my question, finally. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the Mac Pro cannot be booted from an external drive. I hope I'm wrong, since I'll be loading up the Mac Pro with drives(5 total) and one bootable external HDD as well if that will work.

Thanks in advance for any advice you folks can offer.[/QUOTE]"



Indeed the Mac Pro can be booted from an external drive whether by USB or by Firewire, though firewire is much quicker than USB 2.0. How you would do that is go into system preferences. Select Start up disk. You will see your external drives in yellow(USB and Firewire). Select one of those and your machine will boot up OS X on the external drive.

ANOTHER way you can do this is by holding down the OPTION key and you will be presented with the startup disk manager - a row of bootable volumes. Choose which one you want to boot from.

So, yes the Mac Pro can be booted from external drives. I do it all the time.

 

[Garnick]

Hi,
Indeed the Mac Pro can be booted from an external drive whether by USB or by Firewire, though firewire is much quicker than USB 2.0. How you would do that is go into system preferences. Select Start up disk. You will see your external drives in yellow(USB and Firewire). Select one of those and your machine will boot up OS X on the external drive.

ANOTHER way you can do this is by holding down the OPTION key and you will be presented with the startup disk manager - a row of bootable volumes. Choose which one you want to boot from.

So, yes the Mac Pro can be booted from external drives. I do it all the time.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I'm quite familiar with the process and I've been doing the same for a number of years. However, I thought I had read that it was not possible with the Mac Pro. Glad to hear otherwise, since this is a fundamental part of my backup strategy and I wouldn't want to do without it. Thanks again.