Make backup bootable without restoring

[willO]

Just switched to Leopard on iMac and one of my two partitioned drives on LaCie external is no longer bootable. It's the only copy I have so there is nothing to copy from -- to.

Question is, how do I make it bootable without copying?

Should I just copy the backup to the backup?

Thanks, WillO

[dnanian]

Was in changed in some way? How have you determined it's not bootable?

[willO]

The particular volume is not recognized in Sys Prefs Startup Disk. Nor was my main backup, which became recognized when I did the Super Duper back up from the Intel imac back to the LaCie external drive.

I have a LaCie external hard drive partitioned for 1) the backup of Macintosh HD, and 2) the backup of an iBook G4, which was firewired over via Target Disk Mode. Come to think of it, this backup may never have been bootable. Yet I could swear it used to show up in Startup Disk.

It's icon shows on the desktop and I can access files, so it's still functional, but not bootable.

The SD manual indicates the possibility of backing up over a network, but I can't quite figure out what to do there.

[dnanian]

It's mispartitioned (likely APM or MBR when it should be GUID) -- see the FAQ (Help > Frequently Asked Questions)...

[willO]

Thanks Dave,

The problem may be that when I bought this Intel iMac the backup on the LaCie was not recognized, which had been backed up on the old PPC iMac. So I had to completely backup again to make it recognizable in Sys Prefs Startup Disk on this Intel iMac. Fortunately there was nothing on the backup that I lost.

As far as I know the partitioning is OK. It was done via Disk Utilities on the PPC iMac.

Now here's the problem. The secondary backup volume in question exists on the LaCie (with an icon on my desktop), but in order to make it bootable I will have to get SD to back it up to itself and thus make it bootable. Is this possible?

Will, increasingly feeling stupider by the minute.

[dnanian]

Um, no: there are multiple types of partition types, and it sounds like you wouldn't have partitioned as GUID (for Intel) when you did it. I've given instructions elsewhere on the forums (search for GUID) for how to properly partition, too...

[willO]

Dave, this should wrap things up.

Is it possible to use Disk Utility to GUID the second partition without screwing up the whole external hard disk, or do I have to erase the whole thing and start over?

I'm sure I read that once partitioned a hard disk cannot be altered (even renamed) in part without changing the whole thing.

[dnanian]

No, a partition scheme is disk-wide, you can't "GUID" a single partition. iPartition, from Coriolis Systems, should be able to change the partition scheme non-destructively, and can certainly create/resize/remove partitions as well.

[willO]

I'll check that out. Thanks Dave for all your help.

Will