Booting a Mac From an External Drive
I ran out of disk space on my mac-mini, so I bought an external drive to increase storage. I thought it would be simplest to have a single hard drive to back up and maintain rather than scatter files across the mini’s internal drive and the external drive - I found using multiple-drives in a Windows environment was clumsy and figured the same thing would apply for OS X.
It was surprisingly easy to move my entire operating system install, including all programs, user data, configuration, etc. to the external drive. Here are the steps:
- format your backup drive as Mac OS X extended, journaled with Disk Utility.
- back up the entire internal drive to the external fire wire drive with carbon copy cloner.
- with System Preferences, set the startup disk to the external drive
- reboot
Technorati Tags: easy, OS X, disk space