What makes a volume bootable?
Bootability comes down to a few simple rules: • The hard drive enclosure must support booting a Macintosh (applies to external hard drives only) • The computer must support booting from the hard drive’s partition format (e.g. APM vs GPT vs MBR) • The cloned filesystem must have all the required components of Mac OS X • The cloned operating system must be properly “blessed” When you buy a hard drive enclosure that you intend to use to boot your Mac, caveat emptor — not all enclosures will boot a Mac (or any machine for that matter). Be sure to check that the manufacturer or vendor supports booting a Mac with the enclosure. You may even have to pay attention to whether they support booting your particular architecture (e.g. PowerPC vs. Intel). Some Western Digital enclosures had this problem. If you can’t find solid proof that an enclosure will boot your Mac, don’t buy it. Once you have your new hard drive (in an enclosure or installed into your computer), you need to a) apply a partiti
