External Cloned Drive Password

[michaelt74]

Hi

I have an Intel Imac 2007 model & Buffalo usb 500gb external hard drive. I cloned my hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner and all worked fine until I tried to restore my iMac:

I booted from the external disc, since I made sure the back up was bootable.
On boot up, a Mac OS window opened up titled 'Michael's computer' and requested a user name and password. It rejected my admin user name and password. I did not set up any password for the external drive and have booted up before and have never seen this pop up window.

I tried to reset the password using my Mac OS system disk as a start up disk and holding down the option key. When I got the option to reset the password, I could see the internal drive & the external drive and could reset the password on the internal drive, but the option for the external drive was greyed out.

As a result I cannot boot up my system from the external drive and can therefore not restore my iMac. How can I boot into my system from the external drive?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[ADent]

When you boot of the system disk can you see the files on the drive?

Do you think the drive is hardware locked or the Mac put a encrypted drive image there?

Can you snapshot the password screen and post?

 

[michaelt74]

Adent, thanks for the reply. I've decided to cut my losses and try to decipher how one is supposed to use Carbon Copy Cloner for my next backup or wait for Snow Leopard and the newest edition of Time Machine.