Boot from Lacie FireWire Combo Drive?

I am waiting for my newly purchased "Snow iMac" to arrive and have run into some problems. I have checked on the Apple website and to my knowing i'm getting the Summer 2001 model. On the specification sheet i looked at on the Apple website it says that my model will have a CD-RW Combo type drive (reads cd's and dvd's and burns cd's). However on the item description i got on eBay - i bought the iMac on eBay - it says it only has a CD-ROM drive! In the worst case scenario it would turn up and have a CD-ROM drive, and i only have Tiger on a DVD. I do have a Lacie FireWire drive that reads DVD's would i be able to boot from it with the Tiger dvd and install Tiger that way?
Thanks, Joe.

Joe,I'm glad you went with that other iMac Snow - saves on worrying about the RAM upgrade for a bit - and was cheaper in the end!
On the specification sheet i looked at on the Apple website it says that my model will have a CD-RW Combo type drive (reads cd's and dvd's and burns cd's). However on the item description i got on eBay - i bought the iMac on eBay - it says it only has a CD-ROM drive!
Here are the iMac specs: Low End Mac. No iMac G3 Slot Loader had a combo drive from new. The later ones had CD-RW drives which do not read DVDs. The Snow either has a DVD-ROM (500MHz) or a CD-RW (600MHz) so unless someone's been tinkering you're getting a CD-RW.
But you should be able to use the external FW drive just fine.
regards
mrtotes

Similar Messages

Can't boot from my firewire external drive

I have a 80 Gb LaCie firewire drive where I have installed (since Phanter) an operating system. All things were OK until I updated the system to OS X 10.4.10 in my G3 iMac (slot-loading). Since then I was unable to boot from the external drive. I had updated the drive's firmware, installed OS X 10.4.10 in it, but nothing has solved my issue. Can anyone help me with this?
Helder Monteiro
iMac G3 slot-loading Mac OS X (10.4.10) iBook G4 - 10.4.10

Helder,
I apologize if I sounded like I was finding fault with your use of English, which I think you use very well. My own abilities with any foreign language are embarrassingly poor ... & I'm not that great with my native English one either!
My concern was that we were not communicating well enough for me to understand your situation well enough to suggest anything that would not make things worse. I'm still not entirely sure of that but let me review what I believe it to be before proceeding:
You have a LaCie external hard drive that both your iMac & PowerBook recognize when either is started up from its internal copy of 10.4.10. With either one, the drive mounts & you can read & write files on the external without problems. The only problem is neither Mac will start up from the external drive, which has a copy of 10.4.10 installed on it in the same way as with your Mac's internal drives, that being booting from the Tiger installer disk, installing the base version of the OS on it & then updating it to 10.4.10 with some succession of Apple updates downloaded from Apple. You have also tried the PPC version of the 10.4.10 combo update. None of this has resolved the problem.
If this is all true & accurate, then I suggest you start by attaching the drive to one or the other Mac while booted normally & seeing if the external drive appears as a choice in System Preferences > Startup Disk. You do not have to select it if appears; the test is just to see if the Mac recognizes it as having a valid OS version. If it does appear in the list, hover the mouse pointer over it until a popup box appears, which will tell you the version of the OS installed.
If it does not appear in the list, it means there is no valid version of the OS installed. If it does, you could try selecting it & restarting, but I suspect from what you have said, it won't work -- the Mac will display a question mark for a while on startup, eventually give up on the drive & start from the internal one. (If so, don't forget to reset the startup disk to the normal one to speed up future restarts.)
Either way, launch Disk Utility & run the "Repair Disk" function on the external drive. If it finds anything wrong, continue to repeat the repair until it passes. If it reports failure, stop & report that here before continuing.
If the drive was recognized in the system preference, also run the "Repair Permissions" step. (if not, it is unlikely this will be an option.) If the drive passes both tests now, try booting from it again by whatever method you prefer.
If it does not work now, I think you will have to reinstall the OS. If you have room on the drive, an Archive & Install will probably work. If not, you will need to consider "cleaner" install methods, which we can discuss if you wish.
Good luck!

Can a MacBook boot from a Firewire hard drive?

I've been trying to install OSX from the restore disk onto a freshly formatted external firewire drive, and the installer says that the drive is not bootable. What am I doing wrong?

I figured it out. You need to partition the drive,
and in the partition options there is an option for a
GUID partition which enables booting from an Intel
Mac. After partitioning in this manner, the install
is moving forward. It coulda been easier, but at
least it works.
I think you can specify GUID from the erase section as well by clicking the Options button.

Can an iMac Boot from a FireWire DVD Drive?

My superdrive just died and I'd like to know if its functionality can be completely restored with an external FireWire drive, in particular can it be used to boot the Mac?
Thanks!

Hello Tyler,
Yes you can boot from an External Firewire drive.
You may not be able to restore the broken drive though.
Disk Warrior may help some...
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
Hope that helps
Regards
Ian

G4 PowerMac no longer boots from External FireWire Hard Drive

What would cause a G4 PM to no longer boot from an Ext. FW HD that was working fine yesterday and in fact still mounts fine on the desktop..... but when I go into system pref's and attempt to select the ext. HD (and it does show up as an option to boot from since it has an OS in Mac OS Extended Format, Journaled) but after selecting said drive the system simply defaults to the main HD instead and not the external HD I selected within system pref's.???
(I've run apple's disc utilities / First Aid ..... it simply says no repairs were necessary).
The HD in question is a Maxtor 120GB 7200 ATA133 in the following ADS enclosure:
Click Here
Same enclosure works fine with a pionner 110D S-Drive.
Any Suggestions (short of installing the Maxtor hard drive internally which I may have to try anyway)?

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,
Ditto to everything Grant posted, with an extra reminder to be sure to download XPostFacto 3.1 and not version 4. I believe on the XPF page ( http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Framework.cfm?page=XPostFacto3.ht ml ), the download for 3.1 is a little bit down the page.
If/when you buy an external FW drive be sure it has an Oxford chipset. If the description does not include mention of the the Oxford chipset, I would strongly recommend finding another external drive that does specify this. Our Beiges are very particular about what they will accept for external booting, and the Oxford chipset is a critical component.
Also, I've found, since I do partition my external firewire drives, that I can boot only from the first partition of the external drive, similar to the behavior of our internal drives. In addition, with one of my Beiges, my "helper" disk that I specify to XPostFacto to allow me to boot externally must be the first partition of my internal drive.
I don't believe that you can actually INSTALL to an external drive. I simply cloned my internal drive's system over to the FW drive. This can be done with software such as the free Silverkeeper ( http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/ ) or with shareware SuperDuper ( http://www.shirt-pocket.com/ ) which are both great for all backups. I happen to prefer SuperDuper because of its redundancy -- it explains EVERY step before you take it and then, even after you tell it to go ahead, it asks you again to be sure That's what you want to do.
Once set up, however, it is extremely cool, and helpful, to be able to boot externally. If your external drive is dual USB/FW, you will only be able to boot when connected via Firewire. None of the Beiges are USB-bootable.
Hope this helps, and keep us posted,
Tina

Boot from external Firewire Drive-cannot repair or optimize internal drive.

Hi all
Connected my new 300 GB Seagate External Firewire Hard Drive today.
Installed Tiger from DVD. Updated to 10.4.3.
Installed Tech Tool Pro 4. Updated to 4.1.1.
Booted from External Firewire Drive.
Disk Utility cannot Verify or Repair internal drive. Does not say or do anything.
Tech Tool Pro cannot repair volume or optimize. Says, "Cannot Unmount Volume."
Is there a fix for this?
Thank you for the help!
Jeff
eMac 800 nVidia. Mac OS X (10.4.3) 160 GB Internal HD. Pioneer Superdrive. 1 GB RAM.

Hi
I did name the new external completely different from the internal.
After booting from the external Firewire Hard Drive, I tried running Disk Utility and Tech Tool Pro from both drives. No matter which drive I run the Utilities from the same things happen every time...
Nothing happens when trying to use Disk Utility to Verify Volume on internal eMac Drive.
Tech Tool Pro says, "Cannot unmount volume" when trying to check Volume or Optimize internal drive.

Stupid question: force booting from external FireWire drive

My PowerBook is refusing to boot from it's hard drive (flashing ?/folder), which I'll be attempting to repair using DiskWarrior, etc.
But it's also not finding and booting from the OS X installed on my external FireWire drive (which it could do under normal circumstances). How do I force it to do that given that I'm unable to set the Start Up Volume in the normal manner?
PowerBook G4 17" 1.5GHz 512MB 80GB Mac OS X (10.3.6)

Dale,
Thanks for your response. I've been through the usual stuff as in your reference and I eventually got it to boot off the external HD by just leaving it long enough - it took maybe 10-15 minutes. I'm booted from it now. I hadn't thought of using the Startup Manager, but will try to remember next time.
As for the internal HD, it's looking like it's dead - neither Disk Warrior nor Data Rescue II seem to be able to see it. I tried Disk Utility from the external HD, but it doesn't see it and nor does the Profiler. Maybe it's just a loose connection internally. There is a noise coming from the PB from about just under the division between the left hand rest and the speaker. It sort of sounds like a disk continually being read or written - ie. a sort of very rapid clicking, but I don't think it's the HD. And I don't think it's the fan. Anyone with any ideas before I call AppleCare?
I did have a very similar problem a few weeks ago (http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1465680#1465680), but Disk Warrior fixed it apparently with next to no problems. I was going to wipe the drive at the weekend & reinstall, but didn't get round to it in the end ... Fortunately I had a backup this time and was able to restore my user simply by copying it.

Booting from a firewire drive with a bluetooth keyboard

I need to get my computer (iMac G5) to boot from a firewire drive that does have OSX installed on it. I understand from other posts that a bluetooth keyboard will not help seeing as the handshake does not occur until the operating system boots as well. Is there any way to get this to work? I have tried selecting it as the startup disk in System Preferences, but that hasn't seemed to work. I do NOT have a USB keyboard anywhere that I can use (away from home in the boondocks).
Any ideas?

Ikrion wrote:
I need to get my computer (iMac G5) to boot from a firewire drive that does have OSX installed on it. I understand from other posts that a bluetooth keyboard will not help seeing as the handshake does not occur until the operating system boots as well. Is there any way to get this to work? I have tried selecting it as the startup disk in System Preferences, but that hasn't seemed to work. I do NOT have a USB keyboard anywhere that I can use (away from home in the boondocks).
Does System Preferences allow you to select the FW drive as the start up volume? If so, you then press the button to restart, correct? What exactly happens after that?
What version of OS X do you have on the iMac (ii) the FW drive?
Have you booted from the FW before? What kind of drive is it? How did you install OS X on it?
If the FW and iMac have the same version of OS X on, try this:
open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility
select the FW drive at the left
choose "repair disk"
choose "repair permissions"
Try again.
- cfr

G5 xserve: How do I boot from a FireWire device ?

Hi.
I have a PowerPC G5 server WITHOUT a keyboard/display and have just installed Leopard 10.5.1.
After setting up Leopard, I made a backup copy of the server HD onto a Lacie FireWire hard-drive device connected to the FireWire 400 port on the front-panel using Carbon Copy Cloner v3.
The backup appeared to work fine.
However, when I tried to boot from the FireWire device by holding down the system identified button at the same time as the on/standby button and then selecting Light 4 (to quote page 65 of the G5 User Guide… “bypass the current startup disk and start up from any other available startup disk”) nothing happened. Instead, the fans just got louder and louder and louder and louder, with the occasional flash of FireWire device and HD lights. I switched it off after 10 minutes and re-booted as normal from the HD device.
Any suggestions ?
Thanks in advance,
john

Tony,
Having thought about this and read Apple's article "how to use FireWire target disk mode" (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583), let me play back what I think have to do...
Assumptions...
a) A working Leopard system.
b) I want to go back to yesterday's backup.
c) I can't use Time Machine as it's an "Advanced" install.
d) My backup is done via Carbon Copy Clone onto my external FireWire device.
Is this what I would do... ?
1) Get my PowerBook G4 laptop, which is also running Leopard !
2) Switch off the Xserve G5.
3) Connect the FireWire backup to THE LAPTOP !
4) Connect the laptop to the Xserve using a FireWire cable.
5) Switch on the G5 and hold down the system identifier button.
6) When the lights rotate select Light 5 "Begin target disk mode".
7) On the laptop an icon would appear which is the Xserve HD.
8) Using the laptop, I then copy from the FireWire backup to the Xserve HD icon.
(I guess, as the fans may be running flat out at this point !)
9) After the backup then eject the Xserve HD icon.
10) Disconnect FireWire cable.
11) Re-boot Xserve
12) Should be running yesterday's backup.
13) Relax !
Blimey !
john

BOOT FROM AN EXTERNAL USB DRIVE???

I know apple has made it clear about booting from an external USB drive
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106474
but I know that there are people who are able to boot from an external drive, does anybody know how to do this?
It's just that id like to work on final cut studio on an external drive for various reasons:
1st: my powerbook's HD is small and slow (60gb)
2nd: my external usb drive is big (160 gb) and fast (7200 RMPS!)
so a little help would be apreciated
best regards

"Actually, USB II is faster than FW 400."
In theory, probably. In real life Firewire 400 is much faster than USB2, not to speak of Firewire 800:
"Wee Wiebetech" Portable FireWire/USB2 Drive Challenges The Fastest Competitors.

Tiger won't boot from external firewire

Installed 10.4.3 DVD on clean external firewire (Extended/Journaled). Before I installed Tiger, I ran updates, and repaired permissions. Everything looked good to me.
I'm keeping Panther on main system drive for now - so from System Preferences>Startup Disk>the external tiger drive appears and I select it. Then I select restart and the promt confirms that the computer will restart with 10.4.3. Looks good so far.
After restart, I'm looking at the desktop, guess what? It's 10.3.9, not 10.4.3. How could that be?
Also, when I restart and hold down the Option key for Startup Manager options - the firewire drive does not appear as an option.
So Tiger appears in System Preferences>Startup Disc as an option, but the option doesn't actually work, and that drive does not appear at all in (Option key) startup manager.
I'm Indexing the firewire drive now (OMG is that slow or what!), but I'm not expecting this to make any difference. I'm stumped. What am I overlooking? Please advise.
Muchas Gracias

R MacCool,
"What if I manually drag and drop the 4 folders (from the Tiger DVD) onto a second internal SATA drive without partitioning the drive first? Will I be able to boot off an internal SATA drive like that? When I installed Tiger on the external firewire I see that 4 folders are there - I could drag them from that drive onto the second internal drive. Does that work?"
No, this does not work. MacOS X consists of more then 20,000 invisible files, most of them somehow connected and referencing each other.
MacOS X DOES boot from external firewire drives, both hard disks and DVD drives.
Why don't you just upgrade your current 10.3.9 to Tiger using this procedure: 10.4 Tiger Upgrade: Decision tree+Checklist?
"Why does Tiger seem to install correctly, then System Pref>Startup Disc recognizes it, but then after selecting 10.4.3 it restarts into 10.3.9?"
I am not a technician, but it could be that the firmware is the primary source for connectivity. After MacOS X has booted the internal firewire drivers might take over and "overrule" the firmware (this is why you can see it in the startup disk preference pane) but at boot-time it exclusively depends on the firmware. This theory might be completely wrong though.

Can't boot from DVD or external drive

Because of recent slow performance on my iMac G5 I ran disk utility and repaired permissions, then clicked Verify Disk. It reported minor errors in directory files and said I should repair them. I tried starting up from the MacOS X installation DVD, but I get a spinning beach ball and a symbol with a circle with a diagonal line through it (like a Do Not Enter sign). I had to unplug the computer to reboot.
Using another computer, I made a startup disk on an external hard drive and tried booting the iMac from that, but I get the same beach ball and symbol. Tried another OS X DVD with the same result.
I am able to boot from the internal hard drive only, but then I can't do a disk repair. I have already reset the PRAM, but that didn't help.
Any suggestions ??? Thanks.

Because of recent slow performance on my iMac G5 I ran disk utility and repaired permissions, then clicked Verify Disk. It reported minor errors in directory files and said I should repair them. I tried starting up from the MacOS X installation DVD, but my G5 still starts from the hard disk and I am therefore unable to repair rthe hard disk.
Can I create a new startup disk by copying my installation disk, leaving off the installation software, and then start my Mac using Option "C".
On my previous Macs I always used Norton Utilities to repair my disk and recover files - are ther any similar packages available for OS X (10.4.7)?

How do I boot from an alternate hard drive?

How do I boot from an alternate hard drive?

Boot Using OPTION key:
1. Restart the computer.
2. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the "OPTION" key.
3. Release the key when the boot manager appears.
4. Select the desired disk icon from which you want to boot.
5. Click on the arrow button below the icon.

When I plug in my Lacie Firewire 800 drive it causes certain apps to crash. Chrome will immediately crash when I open it, so will DVD player. It's only when I plug in my Firewire 800 drive, USB does not cause issues. What's the deal?

When I plug in my Lacie Firewire 800 drive into my Mid-2009 Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion - 10.8.2, it causes certain apps to crash. Chrome will immediately crash when I open it, so will DVD player. It's only when I plug in my Firewire 800 drive, USB does not cause issues. What's the deal?
I've restarted, verfied the disk, repaired permissions, smc reset.. don't know what else to do..

Contact Lacie since it's their product you are having issues with.

Boot from Lacie FireWire Combo Drive?

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