Making a device bootable?

:-|:-|
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Hi,





I would like to make my usb memory bootable. Is it any way to get the drive to show up in startup items in sys.prefs? I have tried with fdisk, hdiutil and diskutil but have not been able to select my drive. I thought it was going to happen with fdisk. Typing fdisk /dev/disk1 gives me this.



Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*1: AB 0 1 1 - 1023 254 63 [ 63 - 16384] Darwin Boot

2: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 16447 - 1985441] HFS+

3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused



It looks promising IMO, so I then tried to bless it but no luck, it wont show up, any ideas how and if this can be done correctly?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    sequitursequitur Posts: 1,910member
    Are you referring to a USB external HDD or a USB thumb drive?



    Do you have an Intel Mac?





    Mac 101: Yes, Intel Macs can be booted from an external USB drive

    http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/18/mac-1...nal-usb-drive/





    HOWTO: Install and Boot OS X 10.4 On a Flash Drive

    http://blog.bradbergeron.com/2006/11...a-flash-drive/



    If neither of the above answers your question, google -

    'USB thumb drive to boot a Mac' OR 'USB drive to boot a Mac'
  • Reply 2 of 6
    :-|:-| Posts: 11member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sequitur View Post


    Are you referring to a USB external HDD or a USB thumb drive?



    Do you have an Intel Mac?




    Thanks, yes I have an intel mac and it´s a thumb drive not a regular HD with usb interface. I have looked around over the weekend trying to find some info about this and it seems like most suggestions are geared towards os x installs which is not what I´m trying to do here. I had a look at some BSD and linux boards but there are some bsd specific tools that are not on os x so it´s not something I have been able to follow exactly.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    This not being an MacOS install is a really important point that you failed to mention from the beginning. With that bit of information, then you problem is probably that you have not used 'bless --legacy'. You will need to read the 'bless' man page to get more information.



    I am not 100% sure that you are going to get arbitrary BSD versions to run like this though. There are a lot of details about the BIOS boot process that Apple does not bother to emulate in EFI, because Windows does not need them (and that was their goal).
  • Reply 4 of 6
    :-|:-| Posts: 11member
    Well you know, that fact that I did not mention any specific os means that nothing should be implied in that regard ;-). In fact, what I have in mind is not to run BSD either I just looked around for some unix specific tricks that I perhaps could use in the terminal as well. What I want to do is to test menuetOS. It comes on a 1.44mb floppy that contains the whole os, without a floppy some hack is required I presume, I have tried to partition my drive into a FAT12 partition for the diskimage but I have no idea if that will work. Perhaps I can burn the image to a CD and make that bootable, but it would be nicer to have it on a thumbdrive. We´ll see how much patience I have left for this though, I might just try it on some old beige box instead and just boot straight from floppy lol.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by :-| View Post


    Well you know, that fact that I did not mention any specific os means that nothing should be implied in that regard ;-).



    The fact that you are posting on a Mac forum and don't specify the OS does strongly imply MacOS X.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    :-|:-| Posts: 11member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Karl Kuehn View Post


    The fact that you are posting on a Mac forum and don't specify the OS does strongly imply MacOS X.



    Well point taken, but it had more to do with how to use mac os. You know, how to make a device bootable. If you do a "diskutil info /dev/disk1" in terminal you get a list of properties of that device, there is a section, "Bootable: not-bootable" so it seems like there would be a way to set it to bootable. Anyway, thanks for your input.
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