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Resolved Question

Bootable Super-duper backup does not boot...

Sep 26, 2011 12:23AM PDT

My mid-2008 MacBook Pro 15 died recently (motherboard failure)..

Discussion is locked

MusicianMBA has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

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Just to add some clarification
Sep 26, 2011 11:26PM PDT

Just to add some clarification, if your MBAir shipped with Lion, then that is pretty much the minimum OS it will boot. And sometimes Apple will load a slightly modified version on there to support specific hardware in a new model. So even though the version might read 10.7, and you just installed 10.7 from the App Store, it may not work. The general rule of thumb is you want to be at least one point release above what shipped with a unit for a more universal bootable external. So if the mid-2010 MBPs shipped with 10.6.3, you want to have at least 10.6.4 on your external drive.

A lot of times, if you try and boot 10.5 on a system that came with 10.6 -- the same applies going forward -- it simply won't boot. You'll either get the Apple logo, but no spinning gear, or it will kernel panic fairly early in the boot process. The latter seems to be what's happening to you.

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That explains it..
Sep 27, 2011 10:24AM PDT

Thank you. So, I guess unless I upgrade the backup to Lion on a different (older machine) somehow, it would not boot on the new machine.

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What you could do
Sep 27, 2011 11:23AM PDT

What you could do is go the other way around, and clone the Air's drive onto your backup drive. You can always go backwards... Well, by and large. Lion requires at least a Core 2 Duo, so some of the early Intel based units won't work, and you obviously won't boot Lion on a PPC unit, but aside from those restrictions Lion should boot on pretty much any older unit.

I always recommend people have a bootable backup drive in the event of a HDD, or SSD in your case, failure. Maybe you can't afford to be without the unit for a few days, or plenty of other reasons. So, maybe pull whatever you want off the old OS, then just wipe the partition clean and use SuperDuper to clone your Air's OS install. Not sure if SuperDuper has been updated to work with Lion yet or not, so you may have to wait for that, but otherwise, seems like your best option. Otherwise you could technically boot the restore partition on your Air, then point it to the external as the target install drive, but SuperDuper would likely be much faster.

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Answer
Just checking.
Sep 26, 2011 1:22AM PDT
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Thank you..
Sep 26, 2011 1:49AM PDT

Actually what does not make sense to me, is that booting from an external drive should not have any interaction with the internal hard disk at all (except that the internal disk will show up as an additional disk as well). So in theory, it should not matter if Lion is installed on my machine.

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I agree there is something new in the Air.
Sep 26, 2011 4:13AM PDT

Here's my bet -> The new backup from this new Air may fail to boot on the other machines.

I've subscribed as I have no way to test this.
Bob