Mac OS X 10.3.7: Secondary volume booting problems

Mac OS X 10.3.7 may not properly boot when it is installed on a drive that is secondary at the time of installation. In other words, for some users, when Mac OS X 10.3.7 is installed to a volume other than the current boot volume, the secondary drive will be non-bootable.

The most typical instances of this issue involve external FireWire drives that are used as backup or auxiliary boot volumes. When such drives receive an update to Mac OS X 10.3.7 while the user is booted from another volume -- such as the Mac's internal hard drive -- they may fail as boot volumes.

One intriguing theory on what might be causing the issue to occur is the presence of a script in MacOSXUpdateCombo10.3.7.pkg/Contents/Resources (also contained in the "delta" version of the Mac OS X 10.3.7 updater) called 'RunAtStartupm' which refers to a folder in /System called 'InstallAtStartup.'

Based on reports from MacFixIt reader Mike Barron and others, it appears that this script does as its name implies: installs additional items on the boot drive during that drive's startup process.

Thus it follows that the Mac OS X 10.3.7 updater fails when installed to a secondary drive, because the 'InstallAtStartup' items would be placed on the wrong drive and would never get installed.

Many users have had success working around this issue by first installing Mac OS X 10.3.7 on their currently active boot drive, then using a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to replicate the initial installation on the secondary drive.

For some users, holding down the "option" key at startup and selecting the desired drive as the startup volume allows successful booting.

MacFixIt reader Gerben writes:

"I did see the same issue of not being able to boot form an external FW disk after having updated Mac OS X from 10.3.5 to 10.3.7 with the combo updater.

"But what I noticed is that restarting and keeping the "option" key depressed will bring up the choice of boot volumes and booting thereafter worked fine. I could not do a cold boot from the external FW disk but I could do a restart and then boot."

In a prima facie odd workaround, MacFixIt reader Steve Regian reports that temporarily disconnecting the Fibre Channel connection cables from his Apple-branded Fibre Channel PCI card allowed proper secondary boot drive operation.

He writes:

"My dual G5 2 GHz. refuses to boot from any external FireWire drive, even though it is selected as startup disk and no other bootable drive is connected, until I unplug the Fibre Channel Cables from the Apple Fibre Channel PCI card. Then, after a few seconds, it locates the system software on the FireWire and boots. Then I can re-attach the fibre channel cables to the switch and my Xserve Raid promptly mounts and operates... seemingly properly. Perplexing and inconvenient."

Meanwhile, Sari Kadison writes that in at least one case, the cause of the problem is a drive having the "Ignore ownership on this volume" setting enabled in the volume's Get Info window in the Finder:

"I was having the same problem that several readers mentioned. I have a LaCie 160 GB external drive that was partitioned in four parts. The main part had OS 10.3.7 on it and I was not able to boot from it after installing the 10.3.7 update on my internal drive. I tried several things [that didn't work] .But then, I fixed it! I did a 'Get Info' on the partition of the drive I wanted to boot from and UNchecked the 'ignore ownership' [option]...after that I was able to run Disk Utility and select 'Repair Permissions.' When it repaired the permissions, it repaired about a zillion of them...seriously, there were a ton and it took a long time. After that, I was able to boot up from 10.3.7 on my Firewire drive, and I did not need to do a new install."

The most obvious and straightforward workaround, of course, is simply to boot from the secondary drive and update it while it provides the actively running installation of Mac OS X.

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