Can I boot without internal hard drive from external USB hard drive?
I bought a macbook core 2 duo off eBay needing a new hard drive and battery and right now I'm trying to test it with no battery or internal hard drive - just plugged in with the mag charger and with an external usb hard drive.
I'm having a few issues installing OSX on the hard drive for now but that should be sorted soon however at the moment, when I plug in the hard drive and mag charger and press the power button nothing happens at all. The green light on the charger is on but that's it.
Is this because the external hard drive doesn't have OSX installed on it yet, so the macbook doesn't recognise it as a drive it can boot from? Or can this macbook not boot from a USB external hard drive? I'm really not sure.
Is this a good question?
2 Comments
Can you provide the model? Most models can boot from USB.
by S W
Yes a model number would be a good idea and to see if the bios will let you boot from usb, you should be able to get that from your startup screen. In the windows world, you can do this, this allows the pc to run from the usb without any moving parts. If you can boot from usb, you will need to have the image file or your OS on a usb stick. Now with that stated, I cannot help you on that one, but I am sure someone on here will be able to find steps to do this. Good Luck!
by luther.haynes