Macbook air booting from external hardrive stuck on startup wifi screen I'm moving over my old macbook computer to a 2010 macbook air, I replaced the hard drive in the macbook air prior to this so there is nothing on the hard drive that is currently in my macbook air. I have my hard drive with everything on as an external drive and I am attempting to boot from that drive so I can copy all my files over. However when I boot from it I get stuck on a screen (first) asking for wifi (there is no exit or skip to this screen it is part of the start up) when I select my wifi and enter my password it brings me back to the screen I was previously on asking for my wifi. I have tried booting via a snow lion software cd but I still have the same problem. Is there any way to bypass this screen??

P.S. I have restarted my wifi router, this clearly isn't the problem here.
You will not be able to boot from an original retail copy of Snow Leopard (10.6) as your Air requires 10.6.4 or later. Your old drive should boot your Air as long as the installed OS is 10.6.4 or newer.

If your old Mac is still accessible and the external drive has 10.6.8 or newer you could do worse than download the Mavericks installer and create a USB installer for your Air.

To do this first download the Mavericks installer from the App Store. This will be placed in your Applications folder. Once downloaded do not run it or move it.

Next open Disk Utility and erase an 8GB USB memory stick, naming it Untitled. If you name it anything else be sure to modify the command below.

Open Terminal and enter the following command-

sudo /Applications/"Install OS X Mavericks.app"/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/"Install OS X Mavericks.app" --nointeraction


When complete you will have a full standalone installer, ready to roll.