Snow Leopard system drive can't boot with Time Machine drive

[sonorelli]

This came out of nowhere. My Hackintosh has been running reliably since upgrading to 10.6.8. I'm using this OS for a Pro Tools workstation, which I just upgraded to PT10 HD version 10.3.3. So I powered down for the weekend, and when I fired it up on Monday, the machine hangs after "Loading Operating System". The spinning slash just stops. I thought my SSD system drive was toast, but after removing all but 4GB of memory and disconnecting all other drives, I was able to use iBoot to boot off of the Snow Leopard install disk and repair my system drive. After reinstalling the rest of my memory (8GB total), everything still worked fine, but reconnecting the rest of my internal drives made the problem reappear. I was able to isolate my Time Machine drive as the culprit. As long as that drive is disconnected during startup, everything works as expected, but when its connected, no boot. Again, this just randomly appeared, and I would like it to go away.

The Time Machine drive mounts and behaves perfectly, as long as its mounted after startup. I've run Disk Utility on it and there's an odd message in the log:

2013-01-21 21:08:57 -0500: The volume Time Machine appears to be OK.
2013-01-21 21:08:57 -0500: Volume repair complete.
2013-01-21 21:08:57 -0500: Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
2013-01-21 21:08:57 -0500: Repair tool completed:

Why are there "boot support partitions" on this drive? Why was it playing nice with Chimera for so long and all of a sudden, it blocks startup?

Any ideas?

Time Machine version 1.1

 

[Say Heading]

Although a very old post, I´ll chime in on it as well:

I observe the same behaviour here, on yosemite.
I have to add that I can mount the (for booting disconnected) time machine hd after boot without issues.
Decided to change the hardware, so I bought a new hd as time machine drive. Copying the previous backup file from the old hd required to use disk utility, as CCC and finder were not able to do so.
I used the restore function which seems to copy blockwise and the file was completely transferred.
But what: The error cause was copied, too!

Now I get the same boot failure with the new drive connected, the spinning slash just stops...