When you are booting from an external hd, are you using the internal one to do it?

LABachlr

Registered
My sister's ibook seems to have died, or at least parts of it has. She brought it to the Apple store to have them look at it. The guy there tried to boot from the external that he had, but it would just show a light blue screen. He said that it could not find/see her internal hard drive.

When you hold down the option key as you're booting up to boot from another HD, are you using the internal one as well? I would think that you are circumventing the internal hd by doing this for this very reason (so you can boot up and use the computer if the internal hd is on the frits).

Isn't this a logic board issue?
 
Could be. The thing is, when you hold down Option, it doesn't simply boot from the external HD. Rather, it displays a list of all available bootable volumes, and then you choose between them. So it DOES try to access the internal disk, in order to find bootable volumes on it. Ideally it should simply move on if there's something wrong, but it's conceivable that some kinds of problems would make it choke.

Perhaps a better test would be to use a CD/DVD and hold down the "C" key while booting. This will boot directly from the CD.

From there, you should be able to use Disk Utility to check your internal disk, and possibly use Startup Disk to make it boot directly from FireWire the next time you try (without holding down special keys).
 
Thanks. Unfortunately, there is a CD stuck in it, and holding down the eject button is not popping it out.
 
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