can't boot cloned drive

I am a newbie, so bear with me. I have a white MacBook. 2gb, 160 hard drive. I cloned drive to a 500gb drive via firewire enclosure. Disk Utility says the drive is good. Startup with option shows the drive and the internal drive as bootable drives, but when I click on it I get the rotating asterisk, and eventually a circle with a slash indicating it's not going to boot. Any suggestions? Thanks for looking and thinking about it. I would like to put the 500gb drive into the computer, I wanted to see if it would boot before I put it in the computer. I cloned it with Carbon Copy.

GUID option selected when the drive was formatted? I understand that to boot from a drive this is necessary...

Carbon Copy Cloner will not render a drive bootable unless...

1. It's formatted to the Mac OS Extended Journaled file system and

2. The partition scheme is set to GUID.

Did you clone the 500 GB drive from the 160 GB using the above parameters?

chscag said:

Carbon Copy Cloner will not render a drive bootable unless...

1. It's formatted to the Mac OS Extended Journaled file system and

2. The partition scheme is set to GUID.

Did you clone the 500 GB drive from the 160 GB using the above parameters?

Click to expand...

So you can format a disc for Mac with GUID but not Extended Journaled? I thought that if you did GUID you'd be good to go, leaving other settings at default?

Read my post again. You have to do both otherwise CCC will not render the drive bootable. SuperDuper works the same way.

chscag said:

Carbon Copy Cloner will not render a drive bootable unless...

1. It's formatted to the Mac OS Extended Journaled file system and

2. The partition scheme is set to GUID.

Did you clone the 500 GB drive from the 160 GB using the above parameters?

Click to expand...

Yes. I did clone using these parameters. Do you think it would be ok to put in the MacBook to see if it will boot?

I don't think it will hurt to try but it is not likely to be successful. Generally, if the machine supports booting from an external drive the clone should boot it whether it is internal or external.

I've cloned drives more times than I want to count usually with good success. I did have one instance where the clone would boot but not get past the login screen.

From Apple, FWIW:

You format as Mac OS Extended (Journalled)

Then partition, even if one single partition, using the GUID scheme. Two different steps.

Thanks for the guidance. I did as you advised and it did boot from the firewire connected enclosure. I then installed it into the MacBook and all is well. This Forum is terrific. Thanks again.