Blue screen when booting from USB backup of Mountain Lion

I've not been able to startup my MacBook Pro. I made a backup of Mountain Lion using Lion DiskMaker 2.0.2. When I press option and the power button then select the USB drive, the grey screen with the apple logo and spinner appears then shortly after I get a solid royal blue screen. Is there anyway I can boot from the USB drive backup to fix my computer?

Solution 1:

Lion Disk Maker is a third-party utility. It’s likely that updates to OS X changed the startup behavior slightly for how your machine operates.

Any reason you wouldn’t use Recovery Disk? (Command + R on boot.)

You can also try booting to the USB drive, but enable verbose mode (before you select the USB drive, hold down Command + V) to see if there are particular errors shown when it is at that blue screen.

Last bit of hope: the author appears receptive to personal technical support questions by e-mail (that’s pretty cool).

Solution 2:

This blue screen indicates that the user portion of the login process has started, and is hung.

How exactly did you get the InstallESD / Mountain Lion installer? What exact hardware downloaded the installer and is that the same hardware as you are trying to boot? If so, then you can conclude that either the copy process failed or drive / hardware is faulty.

If not, you might have a perfectly working USB to run an installer - for the hardware that downloaded the initial package but not the hardware you are now trying to install from this package.

It's not really an answer, but Apple hopes that everyone will avoid this tracking of InstallESD versions and hardware dependency by using a Recovery HD on each drive. That would be the ideal way to re-install your OS since it's more closely tied to the hardware and less likely to run into conflicts unless you take a HD from one Mac and move it to another.