Booting from USB drive

[invidia]

I'm trying to get my Mac Mini to boot from an 8gig USB drive. It has a bootable Ubuntu which I set up accordingly to their documentation. But my Mac is not detecting it on the boot screen. I thought that Mac Mini's can boot from USB since it's Intel-based.

 

[TheStu]

All IntelMacs have the ability to boot from USB, but to date I have only ever installed OS X to USB drives and booted off of them. So unfortunately for you, I have no advice to give.

But, lets asked some questions.

Does the drive work on any other system?
Were the instructions supposed to be good for any system?
What OS did you use to format the USB stick?
What partition table type did you use if you formatted from OS X (GUID, APT or MBR)?
Do you like bunnies?

 

[umrigar]

Macs will boot from APM, both PPC and Intel.

Intel prefers GUID, especially with firmware updates.

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/296262-guid-vs-apm-intel-macs.html

Any given Mac will boot from an OS >= to the OS it shipped with. Very few will boot reliably from an older OS.

Example: Powerbook G4 shipped with OS 10.3.6. It will boot from that, 10.4 and 10.5. It will not boot from 10.6 (Intel-only). It might boot from a 10.3.2 emergency disk, but there may be important drivers included with .6 that are missing.

 

[invidia]

All IntelMacs have the ability to boot from USB, but to date I have only ever installed OS X to USB drives and booted off of them. So unfortunately for you, I have no advice to give.

But, lets asked some questions.

Does the drive work on any other system?
The drive is brand new. Works on Windows and the Mac.

Were the instructions supposed to be good for any system?
The instructions were strictly for Mac. I'm looking for it atm, but can't find it. It was somewhere in the official Ubuntu documentation.

What OS did you use to format the USB stick?
First attempt was in Windows using a third party USB installer: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-a-ubuntu-9-10-live-usb-in-windows/

After that failed, I tried the instructions from the Ubuntu docs for installing it to the USB drive with the Mac.

What partition table type did you use if you formatted from OS X (GUID, APT or MBR)?
Didn't partition or format the drive at all. This might be the problem and will try it once I get back home.

Do you like bunnies?
Depends on their color.

I guess if all fails I'll partition my drive and install it directly.

 

[alfa147x]

This might help from Kaido's Hackintosh thread

Plug in the boot drive you want to use with your DS3L Hackintosh. In Disk Utility, click on the root drive (the name of the brand of the drive usually). Click on the Partition tab. Partition it into 2 partitions (click the "Current" drop-down menu and change to 2). Click on the first partition and rename it to "Hard Drive" or whatever you want it to be named (spaces are OK). Click on the #2 partition and name it "Leopard" and change the size to "10" (10GB). Click the "Options" button and make sure it's set to "GUID", and make sure the "Format" drop-down menu is set to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". Click Apply and wait a minute for it to format.


Now we are going to copy the Leopard DVD image to the Leopard hard drive partition. In Disk Utility, find your boot hard drive and click on the "Leopard" name and icon of the partition you just made (it's indented). Click on the "Restore" tab. Drag the Leopard image from the desktop into the white box that says "Source". Drag the Leopard hard drive icon in the left pane of Disk Utility (the one you clicked on just now) to the white "Destination" box. Now click the "Restore" button, type in your password, and wait 10 minutes or so for it to copy the Leopard DVD image to the hard drive partition. Alternatively, you can do this on a USB drive or a backup drive in case you want to keep the Leopard DVD image on a hard drive for future installs (it's really handy that way).

Just edit that for your ubunutu ISO

 

[umrigar]

I'd be willing to bet you can't format a USB stick as GUID/HFS+ using Windows - am I wrong?

 

[TheStu]

I'd be willing to bet you can't format a USB stick as GUID/HFS+ using Windows - am I wrong?

With Macdrive you may be able to... but don't quote me on that.