Booting from USB stick

[Wiltonian]

Being somewhat OCD about being able to handle (almost) any h/w or s/w failure, ideally with at least 2 possible strategies, I cloned my (SSD) boot disc onto a 250Gb USB3 thumb drive, using CCC. (cMP 5.1, 2010).

It would not boot from the thumb when inserted in the Inateck USB3 x 4 PCI card, but worked perfectly, if glacially, in the standard USB2 ports. Presumably, I have to live with this - which isn't a major issue, given I hope I'll never need to use it in anger? Or is there a way to boot from a drive on a PCI card, please?

Thanks,
Stuart

 

[h9826790]

Being somewhat OCD about being able to handle (almost) any h/w or s/w failure, ideally with at least 2 possible strategies, I cloned my (SSD) boot disc onto a 250Gb USB3 thumb drive, using CCC. (cMP 5.1, 2010).

It would not boot from the thumb when inserted in the Inateck USB3 x 4 PCI card, but worked perfectly, if glacially, in the standard USB2 ports. Presumably, I have to live with this - which isn't a major issue, given I hope I'll never need to use it in anger? Or is there a way to boot from a drive on a PCI card, please?

Thanks,
Stuart

You can boot from a PCIe card. e.g. PCIe SSD, or via PCIe -> SATA port. HOWEVER, for Inateck USB 3.0 card, the FL1100 controller require driver to work, it's not natively supported in the cMP's firmware. Therefore, once you boot to desktop, the card work flawlessly, but you can't boot from it (or use it anytime before boot to desktop).

If you want an external bootable solution. you can either go for PCIe - eSATA card, or simply a firewire HDD. Of course, as you already know, you can boot from the native USB 2.0 port. Since it's just a backup boot solution for emergency, I think that's good enough.

Anyway, IMO, for complete OS backup boot solution. Simply make a clone to an SATA HDD / SSD is the easiest way to do it. If anything goes wrong, boot from the backup hard drive / partition. You don't even need to plug in the USB drive. This is roughly what I have now. The system will automatically clone my primary partition to a backup boot HDD everyday (via CCC). If the primary SSD goes wrong (it does once already), I can boot from the backup HDD, continue my work, and fix the primary SSD.

This is the beauty of the cMP, even the backup boot solution can be internal (natively).

 

[Wiltonian]

Thanks for confirming my suspicions. The advantage of an external backup boot solution is that it can go on holiday with me, and if some burglar pinches the cMP while I'm away, I don't have to do a full "install everything from scratch" process with a replacement machine. I already have an internal boot clone and two Time Machine drives. (And all "data" on DropBox). I did admit to a touch of OCD! ;-)

Stuart