Okay, here we go: I have to ask for help regarding my Mac. It's screwed 
up. Well, not it so much as the external hard drive, and my only 
consolation is that it's not the Mac's fault, it's mine. I apologize 
that I will be posting this in other Mac groups as well. I am most 
pointedly NOT cross-posting, rather I am making individual posts in 
other places; but I want to reach people who may not look here, so I am 
going to cut-and-paste the message into a couple of other Mac groups.

What happened was, I had gotten tired of the incredible slowness of the 
original HD on my Mac (400MHz G3 iMac) and finally got the idea to use 
my external FireWire HD as the startup disk. Why this took me so long, I 
don't know. But I had already put OS X 10.3 on it so I could run 
DiskWarrior on my original HD. I just hadn't thought of it as a startup 
disk. So I thought I would try it; I switched my startup disk to the 
external HD, restarted, and it fired up like a dream. Fast, fast, fast. 
No problems whatsoever. Then, because it suggested so when it fired up, 
I decided to upgrade to 10.3.6.

Here's where I screwed up: while it was installing the upgrade, I 
somehow got the fool idea that it might revert somehow to the original 
startup disk and I decided to check the system prefs to make sure. (I'm 
a slightly-OCD checker. When I leave my apartment, I never close the 
door unless I have my keys in my hand, and usually I have to be looking 
at them, *just to be sure.* Then when I leave the building to go to my 
car, I check my keys again, even if they haven't left my hand, *just to 
be sure.* It has its benefits: I haven't locked my keys in the car in 
years.) So while it was running the upgrade, I checked to make sure I 
had the right startup disk. Except that froze the system.

I waited for a little bit for the system to somehow magically get going 
again, but it didn't; it remained stuck in the same place it had seized 
up. So. What could I do but restart the whole thing? I forced a restart. 
The external HD was still the startup disk. I got the graphite-on-gray 
Apple logo for a few minutes, and then something I had never seen 
before: a graphite circle-slash symbol. A great big NO right on my 
screen. I let it sit and spin for a few minutes and then forced another 
restart, detaching the FireWire cable in between forced shutdown and 
forced restart. 

It restarted, looked for the startup disk, couldn't find it, and so 
defaulted to the original HD. No problem there, though it took longer 
than usual. (Quite a bit longer.) I tried restarting with the external 
HD as startup again and got the same problem. Forced restart again; ran 
DiskWarrior on the external HD. It said it found (and fixed) problems. 
Cool. Restarted it; got the same NO symbol again. Gack. Forced restart. 
Got the original 10.3 install disk and re-installed Panther on the 
external HD. This took approximately forever. Restarted. Got the big NO 
symbol again. Grrr. I ran the Disk Utilities on it, cleaned it up and 
did a restore, and restarted. Great big NO symbol again. Restarted. This 
time, I got the idea--a good one, I think--to go to Apple's site and 
download the 10.3.6 upgrade and try that. So I downloaded the upgrade, 
rather than going through the Software Update feature. Once I downloaded 
the upgrade, I ran the install program on the external HD. This took not 
very long at all (I am guessing because the original installation was 
mostly in place but had been interrupted.) 

After the install, I restarted with the external HD as the startup disk. 
This time, I did not get the big NO symbol; all I got was the graphite 
Apple logo. But that was it. I decided to wait it out to see if it would 
eventually get the idea and restart. While I was waiting, I fell asleep 
and slept for the next 6 hours. When I woke up, the thing was still 
sitting there with the little spinning symbol and the graphite Apple 
logo. Obviously it had improved, but not by much. I did a forced 
restart, let it restart from the original HD, re-attached the external 
HD, and that's where I left it. I'm really lost as to what to do now. 
I've tried two reinstalls, several restarts, Disk Utility, and 
DiskWarrior, all to no avail. Does anyone here have any idea what I can 
do to get my external HD into startup-ability? 

It was so beautiful, the first time it started from the external HD. But 
only the once. Please tell me it won't be the last!


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Don't Blame Me...I Voted For Jed Bartlet
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