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trying to upgrade harddrives and i have tried booting from an external harddrive and upon starting up, after a few moments a question mark appears on the screen and flashing with the light on the external hard drive as if they were comunticating although i don’t get the harddrive icon to choose to boot from there. thanks for any help! ken

Are you pressing the Option key when you power up? It sounds like you aren’t booting up on the external here. Also make sure the external drive has the full OS installed.