ext USB drive boot problem

[simes6600]

Have Kalyway 10.5.2 running on my Dell Inspiron 1525, with one small hangup...

originally, i created two partitions on my internal HD, kept the Vista one and created a new 25gig one (all the space i could afford as i have a load of Vista stuff on here). tried the Kalyway installation as per above and got a nice new dual boot system with Vista and MacOSX.

as i wanted more HD space for MacOSX, i bought a new Maxtor Basics 500gb external Sata USB HD, and installed MacOSX to that, with two partitions split evenly (deleted the old internal install). This left me with Vista auto booting, and pressing F12 at the dell logo to boot from the MacOSX external drive if i needed the Mac.

the Maxtor external drive can be very slow to wake when the laptop is first switched on, and therefore doesn't always recognise Darwin when i press F12, just gives a "could not find boot sector error" about 50% of the time. when it does boot, MacOSX works great. tried setting the bios to autoboot the ext USB drive first and its still slow to wake.

is there anything i can do to the external drive to have it fully awake when i turn the laptop on?

[LawlessPPC]

if you can power it externaly before you switch laptop on or some bios's support delay on boot

[simes6600]

unfortunately the bios in the dell doesn't have a delay on boot, and the USB external drive has no on/off switch.

have tried a few "workarounds" like going into the bios at boot and waiting for the drive to spin (doesn't work), set the bios to do a thorough test at boot to create a delay (doesn't work) and waiting for the hard drive to become active at the F12 boot select screen (also no good).

only way i can get it to work (and this only 50% of the time) is to switch on the laptop, let it autoboot into Vista, restart the laptop at the Vista login screen, hit F12 and select boot from external USB. a pain, and as i said, this only works 50% of the time, rest of the time i just get a "no boot sector on USB device" message instead of Darwin.

[Ianxxx]

how about using vista bootloader to start osx, this way you can wait at the vista boot options screen till usb drive boots up