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External hd Lion boots on mac mini, not on MacBook pro :/

N

noob17

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 24, 2006
94
1
Hi guy,

I would really appreciate some help with this. I have installed mac os lion on an external hd which I have full access to and boots fine through USB when connected to my mac mini.

Now If I connect the same external harddrive to my MacBook pro (internal hard drive has been wiped via disk utility) and I
Use the option key to boot via USB. All I get is the apple sign and the spinning loading sign. I have left it for hours and the same
Thing happens.


Is there a problem with my MacBook pro? Any help would really be appreciated :)
 
You don't happen to have one of the new MBPs, do you? Apparently Lion is incompatible with them at the moment.
 
No, it's the old late 2008 model. It worked fine when I installed it on a partiion of the internal hd. But I wanted to replace the whole partition this time
Round.

I now
Have it running on a 1tb external
Hd and 16gb USB stick.. Both of which boot fine on my mac mini but they both get stuck at the apple sign when I try to
Boot on the MacBook pro.

Its so puzzling :/
 
Hey, try to press CMD+V right after you selected disk to boot and check for messages that will displayed. Maybe that will help to find out what the problem is.
 
Ok booted in verbose mode with both my lion partitions. They both stop at the same place...

NVEthernet::setLinkStatus - valid but not active
Sandbox: sandboxd(104) deny distributed-notification-post
Sandbox: sandboxd(125) deny distributed-notification-post

What does that mean? Did a quick search on google but didn't really find anything helpful
 
My amateur thought might be that, when you installed Lion via a Mini, it installed behind-the-scenes stuff that the Mini requires. Maybe there are missing components that the MBP needs but Lion doesn't have because Lion was installed with a different hardware configuration.

Of course, this might be totally wrong though. I once was able to get a release-version of a MacBook Snow Leopard system running in a Mini by swapping HDs...
 
Solved :)

Just in case anyone else has this issue, i thought i would share the solution.

Basically, it seems that lion requires the internet to boot up for the first time. So because it was connected to my mac mini (ethernet), there was no problem.

Obviously my macbook pro was wireless, so all i did was connect the macbook pro via ethernet, it booted up fine and now all works fine.

thanks again for all the suggestions :)
 
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