My WD Passport Studio for Mac won't boot via FireWire 800/400

Greetings to the forum.

I have recently purchased a WD Passport Studio (500GB) aiming to use it as a system clone for my Mac, i.e. to clone my entire Mac OS X partition and then boot from the Passport using FireWire.

First of all, I should mention that I followed the instructions once I opened the box and connected my drive as it was explained.  I was prompted to upgrade the firmware and the SmartWare software, which I did successfully.  Now, my drive has:

Firmware: v1.012

SmartWare: v1.2.2.5

I then created a bootable partition on the Passport using Mac OS’s Disk Utility.  That partition has exactly the same characteristics as the system partition of my Mac, i.e. Filesystem: Mac OS Extended (Journaled), it is bootable etc.

I then proceeded to clone my system using SuperDuper!, which completed successfully.  All the above took place with the Passport disk connected to my Mac via the WD FireWire 800 cable w/o any issue at all.

Then, I shut down my Mac and tried booting using the Alt key, in order to select the boot volume - still using the FireWire 800 cable connection.  The boot manager comes up and shows only my “Macintosh HD”, i.e. my Mac’s internal system partition and no other volumes.

Retried a couple of times w/o any difference in behaviour.

Then, I tried connecting the Passport using the FireWire 400 cable; still, the same behaviour.

Finally, I tried connecting the Passport using the USB cable; this time, the cloned volume showed up in my boot manager (with an orange external disk icon).  I selected it and the boot process completed successfully.  I was able to log in and log out w/o problems, with the sole exception that it was significantly slower than my Mac’s internal system.

My question is: is it possible to boot my cloned Mac OS X system from my Passport using the FireWire connection?

1 Like