Booting from a USB drive

[Timmy]

Originally Posted by dnanian

You know, PPC Macs can't really boot from USB. Macs with USB*1* ports *might* be able to start up from USB, but very slowly. USB2 Macs that are PPC based can't: I think people are misinterpreting what they're seeing...

Look at this comment from a user with USB2/PPC hardware:

I found the following interesting anomaly when attempting to boot from my USB 2.0 Western Digital "My Book" drive. First I tried to make a clone of my Mac's drive using RsyncX. While it appears that the synchronization process was successful, I found I was not able to boot from the remote drive as I expected (it's well known that booting from an external USB drive isn't supported on Macs). I then tried, as the comment suggested, making my backup clone with SuperDuper!. Somehow, my Mac was actually able to boot off the USB 2.0 drive using the backup clone made by SuperDuper!.

I don't know exactly what SuperDuper! does outside of simply copying files so I can't speculate on why this program allowed my Mac to boot off a USB 2.0 drive. I'll provide my system information in case it helps someone figure out why this worked.

Powerbook G4 12"
PowerPC 1.33 GHz
10.4.8