Is it possible to detach an external firewire BOOT disk during sleep?

Hi,
I have an aging PowerBook G4 17 inch (3 years and 3 months) which is still good and fast enough for my needs. Last year the display and motherboard were changed which cost me some money so I would like to hold on to it for one or two more years. Yesterday I suddenly heard a strange noise coming from the hard disk and the Finder and Disk Utility ran extremely slow afterwards for some time. I shut it down, waited a couple of hours and now everything seems to be normal. I take it the hard disk might soon die (Toshiba make, more than 3 years old, a lot of graphics work requiring disk activity). Or 1° I replace the internal hard disk or 2) I buy an external firewire disk to boot from (which I can continue using afterwards if the laptop goes dead). I am leaning towards the second solution. However I would like to know:
1. Is it good behavior to put the computer to sleep, detach the hard disk (from which I booted) and attach it before waking it again? This would make it easy to transport it. I did a test and it seems to work however one test might not be conclusive...
2. Would my system be as fast as with an internal one (assuming I buy an external FireWire 800)?
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
PS: what is the average life of a PowerBook? The sales guy from a local Apple shop told me that after 4 years any Mac is good for the trash.

The sleep removal will work as long as the battery doesn't go flat but is not really good practice to remove a boot disk after startup.
Speed would be reasonable but internal would be better, replacing the internal drives on AlBooks is a bit fiddly but it can be done, see here for a guide.
The guy in the shop was trying to sell you a new Mac, there are people out there still using 10+ year old Macs!

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Hello all.
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Anyway, so I (was able to) mount the hard disk, and I was successful in erase and reformating it.
But when I (try to) repair it with Disk Utility's First Aid, this report is what I get:
(The usual 'Checking...' text lines, text in BOLD indicates RED colour text)
Checking HFS Plus volume
Checking Extents Overflow file
Checking Catalog file
Checking Catalog hierarchy
Checking volume bitmap
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
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(OK Button)
I guess this hard disk is really a gone case?? I am quite OK just to replace it with a brand new one... maybe all the trouble I had in the beginning is because I may already have a faulty backup drive to begin with???
Thanks and cheers

Hi Kappy,
I knew there was something about "not mixing" PPC and Intel versions of dealing with the external drive.
The drive was originally prepared on an Intel Mac mini Core Duo. But it should also mount normally on a PPC mac as an external hard drive right?
Here's the sequence of events:
1. Tried to boot from the Back Up/Clone Drive of the Mac mini Core Duo, through my MacBook Core 2 Duo, but failed to boot up
I had to shut down the MacBook (prolonged Bluescreen)
2. When I reboot the MacBook, and tried to mount the ext drive as normal, nothing happens, I knew something was wrong
3. Able to reach the vendor, use the Mac mini again to erase and reformat the drive, then check with DU, everything is OK
Clone with SuperDuper
After that check again with DU, not everything is alright, there are errors.
4. Brought the drive home, try to mount on my iMac G5, nothing happens.
I did a check on this forum, and the reply was that I should be able to use Disk Warrior 4 (Universal) on a PPC to fix an Intel-based ext drive. I was very specific and detail in my post/question
5. So anyway, I have no other option, I ran Disk Warrior 4 from my PPC iMac G5 and scan the ext drive, trying to fix it.
It reported the drive is too damaged to be replace with a new Directory, but gave me a Preview Mode. I use this to copy some data out.
But not sure if the data is OK or not.
6. After that, I was able to mount the drive in my iMac G5, so I just use DU and erase and reformat the drive, with Zero Data
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Hi all,
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Message was edited by: Just-Karma

Hi all,
Ok so I decided to not go done the raid mirriring route. Instead I finally made a decision and boughts a Macpower FW800 enclousre which uses the Oxford 934 chipset and a Samsung HD103UJ 1TB Serial ATA 3.0 Gbps
buffer memory32 MB hard disk.
The enclosure is excellent quality and the disk access is very quick via FW800. The disk itself is very quiet and also great for Final Cut with my HD editing. Only noise the disk makes is upon power up other than that it is very quiet.
I have partitioned th disk into two 500GB's. One partition is used for time machine backups and the other is the Final Cut scratch space.
I plan to buy another enclosure and 1TB disk and parition into two 500GB's also. I plan to use one of the 500GB's for Super Duper clone of iMac system hard disk and the second for cloning/backing up the scratch Final Cut space. This second disk and enclosure will be my offline backup system and will not be powered all the time.
Details of the elcousre and hard disk are provided below. I purchased them in the UK. Enclosure was purchased from www.span.com and hard disk from www.ebuyer.com. Whilst span can sell disks in the enclosure you can save yourself a little money and buy seperatly from ebuyer and install yourself.
Enclosure:
http://www.macpower.com.tw/products/hdd3/pleiades/pd_scombo
Hard disk:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/productmodel.do?group=72&type=61&subt ype=63&model_cd=249&tab=fea

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I have WD Mybook Studio and a Lacie2big hard drives. Now they won't sleep when the iMac is put to sleep. I guess I'll have to look for firmware updates. I checked on the WD this morning and didn't see anything new. I'll check on the Lacie tonight.
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Hey Guys... I was having the same spinning issue with my externals hard drives and this firmware update seemed to fix the problems. The update for the WD drives available on the WD support page.
Pick your drive on: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?level1=4&lang=en
Under "For Mac" select: My Book (your drive trpe) Firmware Update - Mac
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I'll try to post this info around for others to fins as well... additionally, if the problem persists I'll let you guys know.

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Hi, hope someone can help me.
The other day my internal hard drive in my MacBook started to click. I did a hardware test, and the drive now doesn't show up at all, either in the test or when I go to install Mac OS X.
Is it possible to buy an external Firewire hard drive, and install Mac OS X on it, even though the internal hard drive isn't recognised?
Here is the external hard drive I was going to buy http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Premium-External-Firewire/dp/B000F6SGB4/ ref=sr11/203-7120413-7742330?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1174334464&sr=1-1
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You need to call AppleCare Support and get the hard drive replaced. None of the MacBooks are a year old yet, so they're all still covered by the original one year warranty. This sounds like a problem that should be covered, why bother with an external drive? If you're not willing to be without it, yes, you can install Mac OS X to a FireWire or USB 2.0 hard drive and run your MacBook from that.
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First off, is any of your Macs an Intel Mac, that will complicate matters since they use a different hard drive formatting and need a different installation of Mac OS X.
Secondly, you can't directly install Mac OS X from an Intel Mac to an external hard drive, you have to do a clone with a software like Shirt-Pocket's Superduper for that.
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http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006061610374449
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I was told I can use my old G3 drive as an external FireWire hard disk. I've hooked up a cable using the noted firewire ports on each hard drive, What and how to do a backup of selected files is the problem. I expected the drive icon to appear on my G5 and just do a drag and drop of files to the g3 icon and wala - nothing is easy......
Is this a pipedream? My system is OS X 10.4.5
G5 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Welcome to Apple Discussions.
Did you plug the power adaptor to the external FireWire drive as well? The G5's FireWire ports don't put out enough juice to power desktop drives.
I've hooked up a cable using the noted firewire ports on each hard drive
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This is for people who would come to this thread searching an answer for the same kind of problem. I had much better success with FileSalvage. I was able to find the majority of my GarageBand files, with MIDI tracks. Audio tracks were not always included but could be found among .aif files. I have not yet searched for the Band-in-a-Box files.
HD

Is it possible to boot a G4 (pci graphics) from an external firewire drive?

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There sure are some radically contradictory posts here! (This isn't typical, at least in this section of the Discussions, RMx2.)
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Message was edited by: Majordadusma

Booting from external Firewire drive--possible?

If I add a USB/Firewire card to my Beige G3 minitower (300MHz), can I then boot from an external Firewire hard drive on which I have installed Panther? A comment by Tina Garfield in another thread seems to suggest this is indeed possible. (I didn't want to "threadjack" that discussion, so I created this new one. I hope Tina sees it and can help me.)
Tina wrote the following:
Having Firewire allows you to have external drives,
which you will be able to boot from, and make
backups and maintenance especially easy.
I was under the impression that the Beige G3 can't see iadd-on Firewire/USB cards until the machine has booted from the internal hard drive. I really hope I am wrong! If it is indeed possible to have the machine recognize the external drive at startup, and there is something I need to do to enable this, please let me know.
Thanks!
GeeKay

Hi GeeKay,
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Hope this helps, and keep us posted,
Tina

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I go to Versiontracker.com to get these programs.

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Create an ISO (Encore) or folder on your hard drive (Encore or Premiere Elements) and then use the FREE http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download to write files or folders or ISO to disc for DVD or BluRay (send the author a PayPal donation if you like his program)
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Is it possible to detach an external firewire BOOT disk during sleep?

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