Chosen Solution
Hi All, Although I have successfully done it before, this time when cloning from an internal 320GB to a firewire 500GB using disk utility, resulted in my MacBook Pro not booting. It starts to boot, and then there’s a weird symbol on the grey screen like a national speed limit road sign (struckthrough O) ?! I noticed that the partion map scheme in disk utility on the cloned disk says ‘Unknown’, and it’s GUID on the source drive, so maybe that’s part of the problem? Anyway, I got superduper instead, and re-did the clone but the result was identical. I didn’t try to wipe the destination disk before I did superduper though - should I need to? Any ideas? Would be much appreciated! If not, I’ll try a new snow leopard install and restore from time machine, but would be nice not to have to do that. Cheers, Phil
Its called a Prohibitory sign, http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1892 if the Partition scheme is not GUID or Apple Partition Map - its a good chance that not all the files actually copied over. I would recommend erasing the external drive, make sure its GUID, and the partition itself is OS Extended Journaled.
It sounds like the 500GB drive is not formatted properly. In order to boot an Intel Mac, a drive needs to be partitioned GUID and formatted HFS+ journaled. Neither SuperDuper or Disk Utility is going to check the partition scheme - they will just schlep bits as long at the target drive is mounted and writable. The symbol you are seeing is the “Prohibitory” sign, which indicates the EFI attempted to boot the selected volume, but there is a damaged or missing low-level file. See the following article for details: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1892
What country’s national speed limit sign? UK?
Can you get the cloned drive to show up on the desktop? If so, select it as your startup disk and restart… Blessing the disk this way usually let’s you boot after. Also I’ve had troubles with 10.6.1 cloned images and had to stick to 10.6, so check that too.
External drives almost always come with a Windows partition scheme and formatting. I always repartition them either GUID or APM (unless they need to be used with both platforms, of course.)
matthewfrey, david, thanks, I was lost and the partitioning did the magic. Thanks
i have a video that will solve this problem for you on youtube: Mac Secret Trick - How to Clone Mac Hardrive with Disk Utility HDD SDD MacBook Pro 2010-2018 https://youtu.be/lfJrAcnHN2g
