[conspire] Firewire os10 booting

mar mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us
Sun Sep 10 12:42:43 PDT 2006


John Andrews wrote:
> This is slightly off topic but. I'm investigating about booting a slot loading 
> imac from FW hard drive.( after updating the firmware and ram.) Some FW 
> drives are kind of expensive and was wondering about firewire enclosures that 
> can use a  cheaper hard drive. I understand that there is one desirable chip 
> that the good FW drives use. Has anyone had experience booting os 10.xx from 
> a FW drive? The Mac forum guys  gave me some good advice but was wondering 
> what you guys think.
> 	
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Hi John,

One place to shop on the Web is www.outpost.com which is really Fry's. 
You will see there that external firewire equipped enclosures cost 
around $60 and then you add a drive. (Newegg is also an amazing shopping 
and educational opportunity.)


An alternative is to buy an external firewire equipped drive ready to go.
Here's a portable one at $130...
http://shop2.outpost.com/product/4294294?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

This is one of the ones I use on Macintosh and Linux costing $200...
http://shop2.outpost.com/product/4430956?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

I also have Acomdata external drives. A couple are USB only and a couple 
are USB and Firewire. I prefer to have firewire as it is effectively 
faster at data transfer for me.

I've used products from Acomdata, Maxtor, and Seagate. Note that these 
are marketing terms and companies, Acomdata in particular. Inside the 
Acomdata is some well-known brand of drive. I've had good luck with all 
of these on Macintosh and Linux. All work over firewire (but not USB) to 
boot a Macintosh. For some iMacs we have in the family, I leave old OS 9 
on the internal HD and put OSX on an external firewire equipped drive 
resulting in a dual-boot option.

Another benefit of a firewire equipped external drive is that you can 
use it for backup and also for learning about Linux. For example, trying 
different formatting, partitioning, and file system options-even LVM.

Have fun.
Mark




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