Leopard + USB Booting on older Macs == True
Saturday, November 24th, 2007After some messing around with attempted backups and hard-drive replacements, I discovered that at least if the OS is Leopard 10.5.1, I could boot my PowerBook G4 1.25Ghz using a Leopard install on a USB2 external drive. Everyone seems to think this is not possible, perhaps Leopard is a nicer boot person?
This little “enhancement” helped me avoid having to unscrew my PowerBook a second time since I was not smart enough to make sure it worked before sealing it up after putting in a new drive into it 
I basically connected a USB2 drive to my Powerbook, ran a backup onto it using SuperDuper[!?;)] and then replaced the internal drive with the contents of the cannibalized external casing. To my dismay the procedure was not successful and I was unable to boot. Apparently this was in part due to SuperDuper not being compatible with Leopard.
I did however verify that the drive worked, by booting the install DVD and seeing that the drive was in fact there.
Lucky for me I was in an experimental mood and tried putting in my original drive into the external casing and booting up with it. To my astonishment, the procedure worked and as we speak I am doing a Disk Utility restore from my external USB2 drive that used to be my internal drive onto my internal drive, that used to be the external drive.
Screenshots: (note the mount point and bus speed)
