snow-leopard from usb

[dna235]

Hi everybody,
my iMac's (fist alu) optical drive is messed up. I have also an MacBook (alu), which helped me to create a bootable snow-leopard usb-stick (got the original retail DVD). But the stick only works with the MacBook; my iMac does not recognize the stick. Has someone an idea?

thx in advance

 

[Apocrathia]

Hold option at boot and see if it loads in the boot menu?

 

[dna235]

yeah, I already did it, unfortunately it does not appear on the iMac. But the same stick is recognized by my MacBook, pressing the alt-key at startup.

 

[old-wiz]

are you plugging the usb stick into the back of the iMac? maybe it doesn't do the boot bit from the keyboard's usb on the side.

 

[dna235]

I did, tried both ways to be sure. I know this problem from other peripheries. (The HD is absolutely clean, no system on it. And the firmware-password is off.)

 

[dna235]

Could this have something to do with the boot.efi file? maybe it has to be modified for an iMac.
I made the bootable usb-stick on a MacBook, and "restore" it with drag and drop. Could it be that the snow-leopard disc boots some-kind different on a MacBook than on a iMac, because of the different Boot-ROM-Version on both machines, or something like that?

Any help would be great.

 

[dna235]

Someone?

 

[Tyr.]

Maybe the filesystem is marked "dirty" (not properly unmounted) try a "repair disk" in disk utility. Does it have a GUID partition map ? Check the permissions on the files, do the have the correct "root" owner or the user you used to copy the files with ?

Edit: try to create a boot disk by imaging the DVD to a dmg then restoring that dmg to the drive with Disk Utility that should make sure all files are transferred correctly.

Alternatively boot the iMac in firewire target mode, connect it to the macbook and install that way by choosing the iMac disk as the install disk in the SL installer.

 

[dna235]

Hi, used different methods, of which none of it worked. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to test my stick on an other perfectly fine iMac 7,1, with the same results.
So did someone else boot successfully from an USB-Stick on a iMac 7,1 machine?

I used and Sony 8GB Usb-Stick (those you can click to pop out the stick itself).