TidBITS: Booting an Intel iMac from an External Drive

Comprehensive analysis from Jon Rentzsch on the new GPT hard disk partition scheme used by the new Intel-based Macs. A serious side-effect of this change is that you can’t create a single drive — internal or external — that can boot both a PowerPC and Intel Mac.

See also: Rentzsch’s follow-up on his own weblog, which includes both good news (Intel Macs can boot from USB drives) and bad (GPT might only work on drives up to 2 terabytes in size, and GPT drives can’t even be mounted by Macs not running 10.4.2 or later).

★ Wednesday, 1 February 2006