booting from external HD

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I have an ibook G4 with OS 10.3.9. I'm trying to boot my computer from an external HD. Shouldn't I be able to copy my system folder to the external HD and boot from it. I tried this but the external HD does not come up when I choose startup disk in the preferences. Nor does it come up when I hold down the option key at startup. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks.
 
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You either need to do a full install from the DVDs or use an App like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your system over. SImply copying doesn't get all the invisible files.
 
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SuperDuper is a great utility for creating external images as well.
 
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external boot drive??

I have an Ibook G4 running 10.3.9. Here what I want to do. I need to run a PC program. But I will never buy a PC. I want to run virtual PC 7 but I don't want any PC junk on my hard drive. I want to put the Virtual PC on a external hard drive that I have which is connected to the computer via the firewire port. Virtual PC will not load on the External hard drive because it does not contain the operating system. So I want to boot from the external hard drive but I'm having problems doing so. I used carbon copy cloner to copy my system folder to the external hard drive but I still can't boot from it. If I choose startup disk from the prefernces window I only get 2 choices. Mac HD or Network startup. I tried Network startup but it didn't work. I also tried holding down the option key at startup and that didn't work. Any suggestions would be great. There has to be a way to boot up from the external HD. Thanks.
 
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I have an idea...if you boot your computer from the original install discs that came with the iBook, and use the Disk Utility in that installer to format the external drive for Mac OSX Journaled and set the advanced options to bootable, then reinstall your system restore discs to the external drive. That way you'll have a fresh install of OSX on the external drive and you can put Virtual PC on it from there.
 
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Can't find the advanced options in the Disk Utility to make the disk a bootable disk. How to you get to it?
 
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if you use parrelels youy can do what i think you want to do,, i run parrellels on my mac, and have the win xp on my external drive. and it works just fine
 
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can't boot from external drive

Still trying to get my ibook g4 to boot from an external firewire hard drive. I installed the system software from the CD to the drive. It now shows up in the box when I open "startup disk". I select it and click restart. It seem the computer tries to start up from the external drive then stops. I get the flashing question mark for a moment then the computer starts from the internal hard drive. Why isn't it starting from the external device?
 
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NOTE: Merged three cross-posts
 
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Palko, did you do a full install on the external disk from the restore disks? And did you format the external disk as "Mac OSX Extended (Journaled)"? Also, hit the options button in the Partition pane of Disk Utility, and make sure that the radio button "Apple Partition Map" is selected. This will allow the computer to boot from this drive. Also, just making sure, but this is a firewire drive, correct? It's my understanding that PowerPC Macs only boot from FireWire, Intel Macs from USB.
 
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Yes, It is a firewire drive. In Disk Utility when I go to "partition" there is no option button. It says "no options available". Any other suggestions?
 
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Honestly, other than making sure that somewhere, Apple Partition Map is selected before formatting is the best advice I can give. I never really messed around with Disk Utility until Tiger and my Intel machine, so I'm sure there are some differences with what we're seeing. If you could go into Disk utility from the main boot drive OS and take a screen shot to post here, that would help a lot. I believe the combination is Command-Shift-3. If not, you can use "grab", it's in the utilities folder in your applications folder. That'll help us see what we're dealing with.
 

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