I have an iMac that's a few years old and lately it's been acting a little flaky (more on that in a separate thread).
I have been doing a bunch of homework on the subject and am at the point where I am trying to protect all of my data and enable recovery if/when something catastrophic happens.
I bought a Seagate 2 TB USB external hard drive. I formatted it with two partitions for Mac, one partition at 300 GB to match my internal hard drive size, and then a large partition. When formatting it, I selected the GUID option so it "should" be able to boot an Intel based Mac.
Using AppleJack (in single user mode, of course), I did a deep clean of my system (something I started doing routinely a couple of months ago). Then, using CCC, I backed up my internal hard drive to the 300 GB partition on the new USB drive. CCC claimed the disk would be 'bootable'.
I shutdown my iMac and start it back up again. At the bong, I hold down the Option key, and shortly am presented with two disks to choose from - my existing internal hard drive, and the newly created partition on the new USB hard drive ... I select the new hard drive.
The apple image shows up, spinning wheel starts up, and after a short while, the fail image replaces the apple image (the circle with the slash in it). I also notice, through the above process, the "on light" on the Seagate drive goes off and on a few times - when the fail image comes up, the light is off.
So --- I am hooped. I can't find anything indicating the Seagate drives can't be used to boot a Mac; but is it the root cause? Or is there some other piece of magic I need to do?
Feel free to point out errors in my above procedure.
Thanks in advance.
Blaine
I have been doing a bunch of homework on the subject and am at the point where I am trying to protect all of my data and enable recovery if/when something catastrophic happens.
I bought a Seagate 2 TB USB external hard drive. I formatted it with two partitions for Mac, one partition at 300 GB to match my internal hard drive size, and then a large partition. When formatting it, I selected the GUID option so it "should" be able to boot an Intel based Mac.
Using AppleJack (in single user mode, of course), I did a deep clean of my system (something I started doing routinely a couple of months ago). Then, using CCC, I backed up my internal hard drive to the 300 GB partition on the new USB drive. CCC claimed the disk would be 'bootable'.
I shutdown my iMac and start it back up again. At the bong, I hold down the Option key, and shortly am presented with two disks to choose from - my existing internal hard drive, and the newly created partition on the new USB hard drive ... I select the new hard drive.
The apple image shows up, spinning wheel starts up, and after a short while, the fail image replaces the apple image (the circle with the slash in it). I also notice, through the above process, the "on light" on the Seagate drive goes off and on a few times - when the fail image comes up, the light is off.
So --- I am hooped. I can't find anything indicating the Seagate drives can't be used to boot a Mac; but is it the root cause? Or is there some other piece of magic I need to do?
Feel free to point out errors in my above procedure.
Thanks in advance.
Blaine