Your Mac may not boot from the external USB drive due to several reasons. If the above steps are performed correctly, your Mac should boot from the external USB drive. Select the USB drive.ĭ) Wait until your Mac boots from the external drive instead of the internal Macintosh HD. Once the intent is clear, execute the following steps to boot your Mac from an external USB drive.Ī ) Connect a bootable USB drive to the MacBook Air/Pro, iMac, or Mac mini.ī) For Intel-based Mac, start or restart it, then press-hold the Option key until Startup Manager appears.
Purpose of Booting Your Mac from USB Drive But, sometimes, you need to boot your Mac from an external USB drive to perform a specialized task. When you power on your MacBook Pro or Air, Mac mini, or iMac, the computer boots up automatically from the internal storage drive-say SSD, HDD, or Fusion Drive. To salvage data from a crashed or non-booting Mac, download Stellar Data Recovery Professional to create a bootable USB drive. Summary: In this blog, you’ll learn different troubleshooting methods if your Mac doesn’t boot from a USB drive.
