Problems using a Seagate Backup Plus as External Boot Drive

[Janit]

I just bought a 500GB Seagate Backup Plus portable drive with a variety of intended purposes.

First purpose is to use it as an external USB boot drive to run Snow Leopard on my Dad's iMac that already has Leopard on the internal drive (2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac 1GB SDRAM).

I reformatted the Seagate external drive as GUID, MacOS Extended (Journaled), with two equal partitions, and installed 10.6.3 on the first partition, using the iMac in question. Installation appeared to work fine, but the final reboot to restart the machine from the newly installed OS gives a kernal panic.

The iMac still boots fine from its internal 10.5.8 drive. When I then plug in the external drive, it mounts fine, and appears to have the full 10.6.3 install (as far as I can tell). However, attempting to reboot from the external after selecting the 10.6.3 partition via Startup Disk again results in a kernal panic.

The panic begins as follows:
panic cpu 0 caller 8x 8558271
unable to find driver for this platform:
\"ACPI\".n"@/Source Cache/xnu/xnu-1504.3.12/iokit/Kernal/IOPlatformExpert.cpp:1389

and so on

Before I start madly trying all sorts of nuke/pave/reinstallation, does anyone have any suggestions?

I have used a variety of other USB externals as boot drives for a variety of machines, and this is the first time I've seen this problem. Other drives used have been Maxtor One Touch (both portable and desktop) and Seagate Go-Flex portable.

My sister has the same model of iMac with 10.6.8 running fine on the internal drive. My Dad does not want to upgrade right now because he does not like change.

[space-time]

http://archive.macfixitforums.com/ubbthr...ype/thread

[Janit]

space-time wrote:
http://archive.macfixitforums.com/ubbthr...ype/thread

Oy. I think I will venture into terminal only if all else fails, since I don't have any experience with it.

This is a problem with the 10.6.3 retail installer, though applying the 10.6.4 update might help.

On the second try, I repartitioned the drive and reinstalled from the installer. This time, the reboot gets further before the machine panics -- I get the apple on the gray screen, the little spinning gear, and then the little restart notice in many languages. No lists of errors this time...

[Buzz]

I snagged the 500GB BU+ deal as well, and put SL on one, and Lion on another. Both KP'ed the first time I tried to boot from them, the after a safe boot booted OK since. 2.16GHz C2D iMac 3GB RAM for one and 2,4GHz C2D SR MBP 4GB RAM for other. Again, OK after initial hiccup. Drives are faster than I expected, which was nice silent upgrade.


///

[Janit]

Getting curiouser and curiouser. The problem seems to be related to using the iMac to do the 10.6.3 installation onto the BackUp+.

I moved the BackUp+ drive over to my Dell Mini 10v Hackintosh and cloned the 10.6.4 installation from the Mini 10v onto a partition of the BackUp+. The cloned installation works fine from the BackUp+ to run the Mini 10v, but the 10.6.3 partition made above via the iMac gives the same kernal panic when I try to use it to boot the Mini 10v.

The original 10.6.4 installation was made directly onto the Dell Mini10v from the same 10.6.3 install DVD followed by an update to 10.6.4.

The only reason for mucking with all this is that TurboTax 2012 now requires 10.6.8 to run.

[Janit]

One more thing. I tried installing the original Tiger version that came with the iMac onto the BackUp+ drive and it has problems too. It installs fine and reboots into the new user set-up process, but upon second reboot, I get the grey screen with the circle-with-a-slash symbol.

Oh well, I guess I won't be using the BackUp+ as a boot drive for the iMac. Time to see if any older USB drives I have kicking around will work instead.