A supposedly bootable drive not showing on opening screen

[pm-r]

Creating separate partitions as noted above is never a good idea.

Hmmm…??? I'd say that's a bit of a generalization statement Charlie, even if possibly taken out of context.

There are lots of good reasons for creating and using volume partitions, but agreed that the suggested solution above isn't one of them. At least IMHO.




- Patrick
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[chscag]

Yes, taken out of context. The reference was to member Jaiman's suggestion.

There are lots of good reasons for creating and using volume partitions, but agreed that the suggested solution above isn't one of them. At least IMHO.

Keep in mind Patrick that we are now dealing with APFS on the majority of new Macs and actually every Mac that has High Sierra installed on Flash Storage (SSD). The ball game becomes more complicated and second thoughts need to be given before attempting to create separate partitions on those drives.

Always a fly in the ointment eh! LOL.

 

[ferrarr]

I have a new Fantom brand drive that shows as bootable in the Preferences screen (see attached screen shot) and is recognied as bootable by Carbon Copy Cloner. But when I start my iMac while holding down the Option key and get a choice of drives to boot from, the Fantom drive is not there. Unfortunately I cannot take a screen shot tof that. What does show is McintoshHD, OWC#2 and something called Recovery-10.13.1. I am running 10.13.4.

Does anyone know what is happening and whether I can actually get the Fantom drive to act a s a bootable drive?

Thanks.

What is;

OWC #2 - CCC
macOS, 10.13.4

It seems to be what you are looking for?

How is the drive connected? Direct to the Mac, or on a hub? When you formatted the drive, what specifically was the step by step procedure?

 

[pm-r]

Yes, taken out of context. The reference was to member Jaiman's suggestion.

Keep in mind Patrick that we are now dealing with APFS on the majority of new Macs and actually every Mac that has High Sierra installed on Flash Storage (SSD). The ball game becomes more complicated and second thoughts need to be given before attempting to create separate partitions on those drives.

Always a fly in the ointment eh! LOL.

Yes, Apple's newly imposed APFS does take a fair bit of understanding and learning its new quirks… and maybe a good place to start are some sites like this one here:
An APFS FAQ: Partitions, Volumes, and AFPS Containers
https://www.macobserver.com/tips/deep-dive/apfs-faq-partitions-volumes-afps-containers/

Now all I have to do is learn and retain it all and put it into practice and avoid all the flys in the ointment eh!




- Patrick
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[Mark F]

Bob, attached is a screen shot of my Disk Utility info using the Show All Devices option.

Patrick, thanks for the link to the article. Based on the attached screen shot it appears that GUID has been chosen, right?

Thanks.

 

[Mark F]

What is;

OWC #2 - CCC
macOS, 10.13.4

It seems to be what you are looking for?

How is the drive connected? Direct to the Mac, or on a hub? When you formatted the drive, what specifically was the step by step procedure?

Bob, OWC #2 is the current CCC drive and is bootable. The problem is that it is only a 1TB USB 2 drive, and is almost four years old. So not only is it extremely slow to boot from (close to 30 minutes), but is too small and likely reaching it's life end. So I "upgraded" to a 4TB USB 3 drive.
Unfortunatley I do not know what the other reference is. When I bought the iMac I needed help at the Apple store setting things up and I do not remember (if I ever knew) what they did. So I do not know how I got the OWC #2 drive to be bootable or what the other stuff is.

It's been a few weeks now but my recollection is that when I took the Fantom out of the box I used Disk Utility/Erase and set up Mac OS Extended (Jouralized) and chose GUID as the partition.

Your message crossed with my latest reply where I posted a screen shot of the current Disk Utility.

Mark

 

[Slydude]

@Jamian I've used the two partition method back in the days before you could boot directly from a Time machine backup. Let's see if I can explain why I don't think this is a good solution for Frank F. As it stands right now Frank can only boot from the external drive if he first selects that drive in the Startup pane. In the event of a catastrophic failure of the internal drive, you lose access to the startup pane.

In this case, you probably won't be able to boot from the external drive since you can't access the startup preference pane. If creating a startup partition were all it took to make that drive work the cloning process should have made that work.

 

[ferrarr]

Mark, have you tried, a clean install of macOS High Sierra on the Fantom drive? Just to test, if it will be bootable?

 

[Jaiman]

Once you install OS X to an external hard drive it also creates it's own recovery partition on the external hard drive.

 

[Jaiman]

Once you install OS X to an external hard drive it also creates it's own recovery partition on the external drive.

@Jamian I've used the two partition method back in the days before you could boot directly from a Time machine backup. Let's see if I can explain why I don't think this is a good solution for Frank F. As it stands right now Frank can only boot from the external drive if he first selects that drive in the Startup pane. In the event of a catastrophic failure of the internal drive, you lose access to the startup pane.

In this case, you probably won't be able to boot from the external drive since you can't access the startup preference pane. If creating a startup partition were all it took to make that drive work the cloning process should have made that work.

 

[Jaiman]

Installing OS X on the external drive will create its own recovery partition. You can boot to the Recovery Console from the external hd and choose to restore your Time Machine backup to a different partition.

Jaiman, with respect I'm not sure you have thought this though from a practiclal point of view and I don't see how it helps our user, which is after all the whole point of this forum.
Say for example an internal HD fails for whatever reason. Would you rather startup with a mint Operating System that then needs to access a TM backup which cannot by itself run your device in order to restore your backed up data. This will not give you access to your data, just a way of restoring it to a new HD.
OR would you like to be able to boot your device with all of your data, settings, preferences and passwords intact exactly as they were and have the ability to restore all of this to a new replacement HD when you are able to replace it in the space of an hour or so?
My wife ran her MBP for two weeks from a clone while waiting for a replacement SSD and only required 2 hrs to restore her cloned data and Operating System to the new drive.
This is the beauty of a bootable clone and I fail to see how your suggestion would replace this fuctionality.

 

[Slydude]

I'm aware of that but I don't think that is the source of the problem here. Creating an OS partition on that drive should produce a bootable drive but the fact that he hasn't produced a bootable clone using the methods he's tried leaves me to believe something else is causing a problem.

@Mark F Just a couple of questions that might move things along a bit:

1. What specific model of Fantom hard drive are you working with? I seem to recall having issues with a Fantom drive I used briefly.
2. Have you tried repeating the cloning process? As I mentioned I've had a few cloning attempts fail the first time.

 

[Mark F]

All of my external drives are connected through a USB 3 hub (powered). The Fantom drive is identified on the box as a Gforce/3 SuperSpeed. I do not see a model number but I'm attaching a description from the B&H website.

Sorry for my ignorance, but how would I install the OS on the drive?

Mark

 

[pm-r]

All of my external drives are connected through a USB 3 hub (powered).

To avoid any further problems with that external drive, bypass using the powered hub and try with it connected directly to your Mac's port.

Oftentimes that can improve and fix any problems.




- Patrick
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[ferrarr]

Sorry for my ignorance, but how would I install the OS on the drive?

Mark

Download the installer, and create a bootable USB installer, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372.

 

[chscag]

@Mark F:

What year model is your 27" 5K iMac?

The reason for the question is that the late 2015 27" 5K iMac has two thunderbolt 2 outputs whereas the late 2017 27" iMac has two thunderbolt 3 outputs. The thunderbolt 3 outputs are also designated as USB 3.1 while the thunderbolt 2 outputs are not.

Your Fantom hard drive is a USB 3.1 drive. I'm wondering if there is an incompatibility in the way you have it connected?

 

[pm-r]

The thunderbolt 3 outputs are also designated as USB 3.1 while the thunderbolt 2 outputs are not.

Good catch Charlie.

Some of the connections will fit, but just won't work as expected it they are incompatible.




- Patrick
======

 

[Mark F]

@chscag, it's a late 2014. Does that help?

 

[chscag]

Yes, that does help. The late 2014 27" 5K iMac has two thunderbolt 2 outputs same as the 2015 model. It wasn't until the later model (2017) that Apple included thunderbolt 3 ports that are compatible with USB 3.1/USB c. Now, that may or may not matter since supposedly your Fantom drive is backward compatible with the USB 3.0 standard and should work OK when attached to your iMac USB 3.0 ports.

We're kind of grasping at straws here but there has to be something that's preventing that drive from appearing as bootable when booting with the Option key held down. I have several USB 3.0 Seagate external drives that have been cloned using CCC and each appears as bootable when the Option key is used. Unfortunately I do not have a USB 3.1 drive to test with.

 

[Rod]

I would definitely eliminate the USB hub from this equation. They are the cause of all sorts of connectivity problems even when they appear to be working. In fact I would be inclined to see if the Fantom drive appears as Bootable when it's connected directly and the option ket method is used.