Force Mac Pro to boot with external SSD drive?

[Webster J. Duck]

Hello all,


I’ve updated my Mac Pro 3,1 early 2008 (2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon) with a Samsung 500 GB solid state SATA drive. I did a clean install of 10.11.6 on the new drive (Snow leopard then 10.11.6 skipping all the OS versions in between). I connected the drive internally with a Velocity Solo PCIe card. I used Apples migration assistant to move all the files from the original boot drive over.


It will boot if I manually select it by pressing option at start-up, but I can’t get it to be the default boot drive using System Preferences --> Startup Disk. Any ideas on how to force this as the default start-up drive.


Alternatively, can I prevent a drive from mounting on start-up? If I do this through the terminal, can it be reversed if I need to boot into the original drive? e.g. “sudo nano /etc/fstab” ---> UUID=XXXXX none hfs rw,no auto


Many thanks,

Webster

 

[redheeler]

It will boot if I manually select it by pressing option at start-up, but I can’t get it to be the default boot drive using System Preferences --> Startup Disk. Any ideas on how to force this as the default start-up drive.

Hold down the Control key when you press Return to boot from it at the boot menu, that'll set it as the default boot drive.

 

[Webster J. Duck]

Hold down the Control key when you press Return to boot from it at the boot menu, that'll set it as the default boot drive.

Thanks. Not sure I understand. In system preferences> startup disk, hit control when I click restart? When I start with option pressed to get the SSD as the boot drive as soon as I click it, the computer boots. If I press control the system does nothing. Sorry if I'm being dense.

 

[frou]

Hold down the Control key when you press Return to boot from it at the boot menu, that'll set it as the default boot drive.

Never knew about that. Nice tip!

Thanks. Not sure I understand. In system preferences> startup disk, hit control when I click restart? When I start with option pressed to get the SSD as the boot drive as soon as I click it, the computer boots. If I press control the system does nothing. Sorry if I'm being dense.

Use the arrow keys and the return key to interact with the grey screen, rather than the mouse.

 

[Webster J. Duck]

Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately, it still doesn't work. The PCI SSD drive shows up as an external drive and just won't set itself as a default. I can live with it, but if my wife restarts the computer we'll have new data on the backup drive.

 

[Synchro3]

It will boot if I manually select it by pressing option at start-up, but I can’t get it to be the default boot drive using System Preferences --> Startup Disk. Any ideas on how to force this as the default start-up drive.Webster

Did you unlock this button?

 

[Webster J. Duck]

Synchro, thanks for the suggestion. I did unlock the preferences prior to changing