OK, USB external hard drive. Cloned my macbook to it via Carbon Copy Cloner, latest version. Checked the drive, all seemed fine.

Tried booting from the external drive, it just hung for 90 minutes. Can't pull drive up on disc utility now.

I had laptop on, then plugged in the USB drive, but it does not show on desk top.

Ideas?

Thanks,

Jeff

What laptop, what version OS X? Info is a little sketchy. Did you try to read the drive with another computer? Did you try a different USB Cable. Most Mac's are not bootable from USB. Could you see the drive before you tried to boot from it?

Have you powered Off the Mac? Restart everything and try again. Can you read any other external drives/devices off the same USB port? Have you tried the USB cable with any other device?

Brian;
Macbook pro running Leopard. USB drive is Maxtor I bought from you. Yes, I could see the drive before trying to boot from it.

I will try your suggestions and get back to you.

I did power down the mac and restarted everything.

Jeff

Of course the drive is fine. It was a bad combination of Carbon Copy Cloner and my laptop. Things are running with Super Duper.

Switcher: You may be able to copy some part of a bootable external backup harddrive using a USB connection (like a file or directory), but you can't make bootable backups with USB drives, and you can't boot from a USB drive (unless you own an EFI Intel Mac).

Super Duper's website clearly says that; Bombich Software makes no mention of it.

He has a MacBook, which is Intel. ALL Intel Macs can create bootable USB drives and boot from them.

Some PowerBooks can be made to boot from USB as well with an OpenFirmware command.