[bastion]

MorganNews, on 05 November 2012 - 10:32 AM, said:

I'm curious: Firewire was for some time the only technology that allowed a Mac to boot directly from a mirrored backup; it could not be done from a USB connected device.

That ceased to be true during the 10.4 era. And, strictly speaking, it was a problem with OS X. Not something inherent to the machines or affecting any other OS you might try to boot.

[bastion]

autnagrag, on 07 November 2012 - 09:44 AM, said:

Quote

I'm curious: Firewire was for some time the only technology that allowed a Mac to boot directly from a mirrored backup; it could not be done from a USB connected device. it is the reason that all of my backup hard drives are FireWire. Is that no longer the situation with Thunderbolt or with the emergency boot partition that is embedded in the Mountain operating systems? Is it possible to boot a modern day Apple Computer directly from a thunderbolt drive or USB 3.0 drive? Thanks. All Intel based Macs can boot from USB. I don't know about Thunderbolt, but I would guess they can.

Intel Macs will boot from USB 2 and perhaps from USB 3, but the partition scheme for the boot volume must be GUID partition table.

This is incorrect. While the installers have never allowed you to install to an APM drive when run on an Intel machine, Intel-based Macs will readily boot from an APM device. This was critical for support staff for years who wanted to be able to have a single device able to boot either architecture. It was even possible to have a single universal partition for both architectures when 10.5 was around (obviously, restricted to the machines that can actually boot 10.5).