booting firewire/usb on two different macbooks, one works, one doesnt

[nervegrind3r]

Is there a problem booting an installation made on one mac, and using it to boot another mac?

Here is the story: I have a macally external enclosure with usb/fw400/fw800 connections, and am using a 2011 mbp and a older intel macbook white.

My goal is to make a troubleshooting drive so I can boot leopard/sl/lion off of the external as needed. just basically want to hit option at boot, and select the OS I want to boot off the drive. So one at a time, I installed leopard/sl/lion on my 2011 mbp, and used ccc to copy the drive image to my external. I can boot off the external with usb or firewire to any of these OS's on my mbp. GREAT!

I want to do the same with my older intel macbook, that is boot off the external drive with the image I made on my mbp. But, it wont boot from usb or firewire at startup. The system either stalls or gives me a do not enter type of sign. If I boot to the OS off the laptop drive, then connect the external through fw or usb, and select it as the start up disk, I click restart and it doesnt want to even shut down. Basically it seems the drives, but doesnt want to boot from it. However, works fine on my mbp.

So bottom line, my macbook does not seem to like the installation I did on my mbp. I have always been able to boot off of external drives with an OS installation I did on another system until now.


thanks all

 

[TheStu]

So there are multiple partitions on the external drive? Because Core Duos cannot boot Lion.

 

[nervegrind3r]

So there are multiple partitions on the external drive? Because Core Duos cannot boot Lion.

yes, there are multiple partitions on the drive.

sadly, I just learned my core duo cannot boot lion

however, I am still surprised I could not boot 10.5 or 10.6 off the external.

I messed around and removed all partitions except 10.6 from the drive, and then it felt like booting up through firewire.

Im lost on that still.

 

[alizee]

You're right that this should work just fine on the MacBook (except Lion, of course). My assumption is that there is something going on with the MacBook. Make sure it's running the latest firmware revision. You can check this in System Profiler.

First, verify that you are partitioned using GUID and not APM or MBR. This can cause some issues (fewer with APM, more with MBR if it works at all).

Second, try installing the OS to the external using your MacBook. If you still can't boot to it, then I think something is up with the firmware, USB, or Firewire on your MacBook.

Hope that helps!