Booting off of external drive causes power-down

1. Douglas Alan - 5 August 2008

   Hi -- I've been booting off of an external firewire drive for a few months now and everything has worked peachily until recently. Now the Mac won't boot off of the Firewire drive.

   Well, actually it *will* boot, but after thinking about it for a bit, instead of putting up a login screen, it powers the system down.

   I've turned on verbose booting, and there is no panic message or anything. It's getting some sort of USB timeouts during the boot process, but they don't seem to be fatal. After a while, the console just says something like, "Syncing disks, halting system, powering down".

   The above indicates that my boot-blocks on the drive are okay.

   The main hardware of the Mac is fine as I can boot without any problems off of the internal drive.

   The filesystem on the firewire drive is fine, as I've repaired the filesystem using Disk Utility, and done "Fix Permissions". Also, when I boot the system off of the internal disk drive, I can use and access the firewire drive without any problems.

   Any suggestions?

   Oh, yeah, I've also tried doing a "safe-boot" using the shift key. The same thing happens.

   P.S. The computer is an Intel-based Mac mini running Leopard.

2. Dave Balderstone - 5 August 2008

   Previously, Douglas Alan wrote:

   Hi -- I've been booting off of an external firewire drive for a few months now and everything has worked peachily until recently. Now the Mac won't boot off of the Firewire drive.

   Is the drive bus-powered, or does it have its own power supply?

   If you put the drive in a different enclosure, does the Mac boot?

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3. Douglas Alan - 5 August 2008

   I haven't tried that yet. I don't have another firewire enclosure to try. I have a USB drive that I think I can wipe, so I think I might use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the drive to the USB drive, and see if it boots off of that. And if it does, then I can copy it back and see what happens. Or I might just buy a different firewire drive.

   But that's a lot of work and/or expense if this happens to be a well-known problem with a well-known solution.

4. Douglas Alan - 5 August 2008

   Having the system set to boot off the USB drive didn't work out so well (I had it that way for a while), as sometimes the drive would just mysteriously disappear, it being a USB drive and all. It worked "okay" if I didn't want to leave the system up 24x7, but I do, and I want it to be stable.