Boot into External HDD wirelessly

I have recently brought WD My Passport Essential Ultra-portable Hard Drive with capacity 500 GB. I have made it into 4 partitions and installed Snow Leopard in one partition. Am able to connect this external HDD via USB port to my laptop and boot into Snow Leopard OS in the external HDD.

However, I'm trying to find a solution where-in I don't need to plug-in the external HDD into my laptop USB port and boot thereafter, rather I would like to boot into external HDD/ access it over WiFi or wirelessly. I have a NetGear router which is configured to provide Internet to my laptop.

Let me know if need any other details.

Please advise.

Thanks in advance for any of your suggestions.

Shravan Kumar. M

Hello and welcome aboard.
Unfortunately the answer to your question is no. When your Mac or any computer boots there are a very limited amount of commands it will accept as it is not running off an OS at the time. And WiFi ( AirPort card) is not a bootable devive but rather software driven.

Sorry
Clay

Thanks for your reply Clay. Its unfortunate my problem has no solution. I wish there would a solution for my problem in the near future.

BTW, is there a way to access my external HDD wirelessly (not boot into) from my MacBook Leopard/ SnowLeopard! This is so that, I can run backups or time machine, I heard Time Capsule has this capability but can I do the same with my external HDD?

If your wireless router has a USB, such as an Apple airport extreme, you can or set up a wireless network with an el-cheapo 2nd computer

Hmm! again another computer into picture...

I just want to connect my external HDD to NetGear router (this has just ethernet sockets, may be I have to get an adaptor to convert ethernet socket to USB port) and mount the external HDD in my laptop. Is this possible? No extra computer please!

You can get a wireless usb hub, an external hard drive ethernet adapter. Just search newegg, compusa, or owc for those terms. D-Link and Linksys both make a couple of options, but your looking probably $75 +

Cool! Thanks for your suggestions Mike.

No problem. You still won't be able to boot from it, but you can use it like a server drive. Now, you are limited to the speed of your ethernet setup, so keep that in mind also...

Is the drive access speed acceptable? What if both Internet usage and drive usage are at same time, is the speed constant?

Yeah, I want this setup, so I can use my external drive to take backups using Time Machine or any other suitable backup software!

Your connection from your wireless router to your computer is going to be much faster than say, sending it over the net. You are not dealing with ISP bandwidths, traffic, etc... Your first time machine backup you may want to do with it hooked up directly to your computer as it may be gigs of info... after that, its just incremental so its not that bad.. I have an external hooked into my airport extreme that holds all my media and stream movies and music from it to my laptop all the time and keep my entire itunes library on it.

Okay! That is nice to accept Mike.