[swac]

I've been looking around and haven't found any definitive answer/instructions on how to boot a Mac from a USB hard drive. Is it possible to boot a SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner clone through USB or is FireWire the only way to go?

[Taylor C]

Intel Macs can boot from USB, PPC Macs can only boot from FireWire. As long as you've got an Intel Mac and the drive partition scheme is right (GUID) you can boot from it. Now, keep in mind, transfers (such as cloning via SuperDuper!) is much slower over USB than FireWire, as with actual system performance once you do boot from it. If you're -just- using it for backups, though, and you'd only boot from it if absolutely necessary, you'll be fine.

[swac]

So how do I boot from my USB hard drive?

[hookem2oo7]

clone the drive with CCC or whatever tool you are using...reboot and hold down Option. choose the icon on the far right..it should be your usb drive

[ghporter]

...and "much slower" is an exaggeration; booting involves reading a bunch of fairly small files, and USB tends to to better at that kind of transfer than at streaming huge files, which Firewire excels at. So while imaging your hard drive to a USB drive may take longer than imaging it to a Firewire drive, booting from the USB drive most likely won't take a noticeably longer time than booting from a Firewire drive.