EMERGENCY need responce External firewire as startup

I need to know which way to go firewire for a start up drive
I need an answer right away since i have just put in my order at Newegg for the ACARD AEC-6280M PCI IDE Controller Card For Mac but the shipping is $22 $73 total
Will this work on a sawtooth duel 1gig getting an ext. 250gif fire wire drive as my start up volume. Using an external hard drive encloseure that will allow me to put 1 of my ide drives that has a usb to ide interface they run abouy $30,
I already have a 4 port usb pci card and a belkin 4 hub that uses an external power.
Of course i can transfer the data of the two ide drives onto the new firewire drive.
I would like to have at least 1 secondary drive (audio/video) files take up a lot of space abs would like a seperate drive for this.
But i need to know which way is less exspensive so i can cancel my order at new egg.
sknoxx

Hi, Steve -
Not quite sure what your question is - your thoughts seem a bit run together - but here's some info on the subject.
If your G4's dual 1.0GHz processors are original, you do not have a Sawtooth model - the Sawtooth models are the G4 (AGP) models, which did not come with dual processors; the fastest original processor for an AGP is 500MHz.
Instead, a dual 1.0GHz model can be either a G4 (QuickSilver 2002) model or an original G4 (MDD) model.
In all cases, if it is a G4 (AGP) model or later it is firewire bootable using the built-in firewire buses - there would be no need to add a PCI card in order to use firewire for booting.
Your G4 is also USB bootable. However, I would not suggest using any drive on USB for other than archiving and file storage - USB is just too slow to use for booting.
If you are doing audio and video work, data transfer times for drives should be of concern to you. For what it is worth, unless you go to SCSI (which would require adding a PCI card; and, SCSI cards and drives are not cheap) the drive with the fastest net data transfer rate will be an internal IDE/ATA drive.

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Need bootable external Firewire drive for iMac G5

I need an external Firewire drive for an iMac G5 PC with OSX leopard that I can format to be BOOTABLE. Don't know where to buy one or even if they're available. I've bought 3 different drives on eBay, thinking each was what I needed, and none were.
I'm frustrated.
Would appreciate. Any helpful info.

I use this one:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MAU4S7H20T64/
and SuperDuper for creating a bootable clone.
(But there are others too: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB )

Need 2 find a way 2 connect external Firewire drive2only USB G3 iBook?

my G3 Clamshell iBook only has a USB port and i need to connect my external Firewire Drive. can someone help me figure out how to do this? This iBook happens to be running 10.2.8 if it matters. Both my other Laptops are having their own big problems<ie stuck at boot only gets to blue screen n stops, but im lookin for that answer elswhere in here after i send this and wait for your answers> please i need your help!! thanx ,
sami
17 Powerbook 1.33 G4 or Titanium Powerbook Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
You can buy a 3.5" drive enclosure with USB that
supports IDE, remove the hard drive from the Firewire
one and put it in the USB enclosure. Mind you, the
iBook G3's USB is the old slow USB 1.1, and will only
transfer at up to 12 Mbps and can't boot off that
drive.
As for fixing the blue screen issue, once you have
your data backed up for certain, then you can go
ahead and check and see if the following will work on
the broken machines:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106464
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
And if none of those works, let us know more about
the broken machines one at a time, and we can see
what we can do to fix them.
... wow, im sorry it's taken me this long to post my responce but it has been busy here on my mac front. thank you for all your input but everything just happened to work it's self out in one of the best ways possible. I bought myself a max'd out 2gig SDRAM,bright 'n GLOSSY 2.16GHz MACBOOK PRO. say that fast twice after a few drinks. Now that i have a working DVD drive i can just connect my USB to my ibook and Firewire to the other, at different times ofcourse, to upgrade and anything else needed. When i'll actually get to any of that is anyones guess since i plan on spending alkl my time on this wonderfull machine that for one thing when you double click open any app by the time youre lifting off that second click that app is up open and finished loading its startup and ready to go!!!! it's about time these run this fast. Thanx Again...
MACBOOK PRO 2.16 GHz Intel Duo 2GB DDR2 SDRAM/17"PB 1.33 G4/TiBook Mac OS X (10.4.7) The Mac and I share the same B-Day off by a decade 1/24/1984 and i'm 1974

External Firewire Drives Don't Mount.... i need a guru.

Warning!!!!!
i'm going to ramble....
2 much sake .. heh heh
i just got a brand butt spanking new iBook G4 14" 1.42 GHz
Tiger pre-installed.
I ran Software Update. As you can tell by my info, i'm at 10.4.2 now.
In a minute i'll tell ya how i got BACK to 10.4.2 from 10.4.5
When i got my iBook I didn't plug my external firewire drives in until (about 2 days) after my update. So when i did get around to building my iTunes library, well, no luck.
My firewire drives would and do NOT mount!
By the way these particular peripherals are Western Digital firewire
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?p_faqid=694&pcreated=1036793224
and AcomData Combo USB 2.0/Firewire
http://www.acomdata.com/hdp/fs.html
drives.
With a little exploration you'll find (at least i did) that they do not have firmware or driver updates for Mac. ( if you find them i'll give ya praise!)
The AcomData drive mounts with USB but not with firewire. The thing that
creeps me out is that my 3rd Gen firewire enabled iPod mounts right up no prob!
Another thing that ties me in knots is that these drives WILL MOUNT on my iBook12" running 10.3.9, as well as my old 5cH00L iMac DV 10.3.9!!!!
I thought it might be the Update so i did a clean install with the dvd provided by Apple and now i'm back to 10.4.2 but still no luck.
I've tried repairing permissions, starting, restarting, rebooting, plugging, unplugging, Updating, Downgrading, standing on my bloody head, looking all over the dotcom.
i swear i did all this with my peripherals unplugged.
i caught wind that though these companies may not provide updates for Mac, if i were to find out the companies that make the "chipsets?" within these drives that i might have luck.
i can't figure out what kind of "chipsets" (Oxford?) are in these drives or what to do if i knew anyway!
exhale
i still believe i have the best machine on the planet right now but .......
i need a guru.
help.
much obliged,
Clive
 G4 iBooks. iMac DV (graphite). gen 2,3,5 iPods Linux on the Pod too! Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Hi, Clive.
Here is some general troubleshooting advice that may help:
(1) Review the AppleCare Knowledge Base document "What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire device".
(2) If this problem occurred after installing a recent Mac OS X Update, and you are also unable to mount CDs, DVDs, or disk images perform the steps in this Mac OS X Hints article.
(3) The following additional steps will often help resolve problems with FireWire devices, particularly hard drives:(a) Power-on the FireWire drive before starting up (booting) your Mac.
(b) Reset PRAM and NVRAM.
(c) Reset the PMU or SMU: In the case of your iBook, I believe the article you want is "Resetting PowerBook and iBook Power Management Unit (PMU)." You can also check the manual that came with your new iBook.
(d) Try a different FireWire port. James Wiebe, CEO of WiebeTech, has published FireWire Port Failures in Host Computers and Peripheral Devices, a white paper providing backgroud information and technical analysis concerning the causes of failure for FireWire ports. This may provide additional diagnostic information.Note that some of the information above is from the "FireWire Problems" chapter of my book, Troubleshooting Mac® OS X.
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

External firewire startup disc.

I'd like to use an external firewire drive as an alternative startup disc (with OS 10.4.10 installed) for my Powerbook.
Could I use a portable firewire drive (powered from the firewire port) or must it be a drive powered from the mains?
Much of the time, but not always, the Powerbook will be using the mains adaptor, not internal battery.
Thanks for any advice,
Tony

*"Could I use a portable firewire drive (powered from the firewire port) "*
Yes

Need User Name and Password for External Firewire new hard drive

In the past, I've worked with two 250 GB PATA drives in my G4, one inside and one in an external Firewire enclosure. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy and maintain all system and user files from the internal drive to the external drive. The external drive would boot just fine. These two drives were both partitioned with 74.5 and 158.4 GB partitions with the system files on the smaller.
The internal drive died so I bought a new 500GB drive and installed it in the external enclosure and moved the former external drive inside the G4.
I again used CCC to copy the system and user files to the new 500GB drive.However, I only gave it one 465.8GB partition. I cannot make the external drive complete the boot process. It stops and demands a user name and a password. I've not been able to supply ones which work.
I have remembered and entered the user name and password which were installed when I partitioned the 250 GB drives years ago. The window thinks a few seconds and then shakes back and forth and then clears the data entry boxes so that I can try again.
I do have an Install DVD for Tiger 10.4 (bought from Apple) and have been able to use that to go back and change the root or administrator password and the User password on the computer. That has not solved my problem.
I have read about 25 pages of this forum and not seen any posts that referred to password problems with only the external hard drive. But I've seen some very knowledgeable answers to other people's posts.
Please help.
Gil

Generally, when Mac OS X is asking you for a username and password, it is when you are doing something that requires an Administrator password, such as repairing a hard drive's Directory or making major changes to quasi-System things.
So Carbon Copy Cloner and Disk Utility are likely asking for an Administrator user_id and password. It will not take a simple carriage return as an answer -- the operation will not complete without that Admin authorization.
If you are among the \[estimated five or six] people who actually read the manual and followed the advice to use a non-admin password for your day-to-day computer work, you may not even remember the Admin username and password.
If you have an Installer CD, you can boot to the Installer CD and choose Reset Password off the Installer menu (10.3 and earlier) or the Utilities menu (10.4 and later). There is also an Installer-compatible version of Disk Utility there, and while booted from the CD is an ideal Time to Repair your main Hard Drive, while it is not being used for booting the System.

Should I be able to boot from external firewire disk?

Yesterday, to prepare for upgrading to Leopard, I copied across my hard drive contents onto an external Firewire drive, by using drag & drop, folder by folder.
I was hoping that this would let me (after a reboot) select the external drive as my Startup Disk in System Prefs, or allow me to choose it if I rebooted holding down the alt key. However the external drive doesn't show up in either case.
Is there something else I need to do to allow booting via external Firewire? Is that even possible on my PB 1.5GHz (OSX 10.3.9)? Thanks.

Close, but no cigar! Copying by drag n drop misses invisible files necessary for a boot volume. The way to do this is to use one of the cloning programs like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything needed to make the FW drive bootable. You can even specify to NOT copy all your files if you wish.
I go to Versiontracker.com to get these programs.

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!

Can PB boot from an External Firewire Hard Drive?

Can I set up an external firewire hard drive as an emergency boot drive, in case my internal drive goes south? Anyone have utility software recommendations for setting up boot drive or mirror drive, in addition to OS X's Disk Utility? Thanks.

Photon2:
Yes, you can set up your external firewire HDD as an emergency boot drive.
Here's what you need to do:
1. Your HDD must be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2. (Optional) I suggest you partition your HDD so that the first partition is roughly equivalent to the size of your internal HDD. The rest can be partitioned for other uses. (See Dr. Smoke's FAQ Backup and Recovery) For step-by-step for formatting and partitioning please post back).
3. Use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your internal HDD to the external firewire HDD/partition.
Please post back with further questions or comments.
Cheers
cornelius

Booting my imac from an external firewire drive suddenly stopped working. Disk still mounts but it will not boot the machine!

I took my MacBook Pro in for repairs and erased the drive for safety AFTER having copied the entire contents to an external firewire 800 drive using SuperDuper!
The copy process made the disk bootable and I was able to boot up my iMac and run it just as if I were working on my MacBook Pro. After a couple of times working this way, the iMac stopped booting from my drive.
The drive shows up when starting up by pressing the option key but then, after a long time, the iMac shows a circle/slash symbol as if it can't find the system files.
If I restart without pressing the option key, the disk mounts on the desktop and I can use it as an external drive just fine! I tried selecting it in System Preferences as the startup disk, but the same thing happens, blank grey screen with the circle/slash.
Since this happened with a Seagat drive - a brand that has failed me in the past many times - I thought it was a disk problem. I had backed up my MacBook pro contents to another Toshiba drive, and booted from there perfectly well for a couple of times...
Until the same thing happened! Thank God I didn't trash the Seagate although it makes very faint clicking noises that will keep me far away from using it again anyway... but that's another story!
iMac runs 10.5.8, the boot disk (and my MacBook) runs on 10.6.8 if that makes any difference... And now I'm scared that when I copy back to my MacBook Pro it might not boot up at all!!!
What gives???
- MerlinCreative

You need to reinstall Snow Leopard onto the external drive:
Reinstall OS X without erasing the drive
Do the following:
1. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
2. Reinstall Snow Leopard
If the drive is OK then quit DU and return to the installer. Proceed with reinstalling OS X. Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files. After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system.
Download and install the Combo Updater for the version you prefer from support.apple.com/downloads/.

Using Disk Utility to make a bootable clone on external firewire hard drive

I was just experimenting with making a bootable clone of my Mac HD (OS X 10.5.2) on an external firewire drive. The external drive booted up and all programs worked. However, there were 3 extra folders on the clone: Dev, Net, Home. The folders were empty so I deleted Dev and Net, just to see what would happen. When I restarted the computer, it simply shut down upon reboot. So, I held the option key and rebooted back into my Mac HD.
My (5) questions are:
What are those folders?
Why were they put there?
Can I get rid of them, or hide them?
Once the bootable clone works as a boot drive, can I delete the data from my internal Mac HD or,
Does the bootable clone somehow rely on the internal drive for additional startup information?
Thank you so much for any information.
Dave

These are system folders that the OS needs to operate. DO NOT delete them.
They are normally invisible which is why you don't see them.
You should simply leave them alone. If they bother you visually and you want to hide them, open terminal and run the following command
*sudo chflags hidden /Volumes/"Nameoftheexternaldrive"/dev /Volumes/"Nameoftheexternaldrive"/home /Volumes/"Nameoftheexternaldrive"/net*
Put the name of your external in the above.
You'll be prompted for your admin password which you won't see. That's normal.
To answer your last question, a bootable clone does not rely on the internal drive in any way. You can boot from the clone and do whatever you like to the internal. However, it's not recommended to run your computer from an external for everyday use. Bootable clones should be mainly used for backups. If you hose your system on an internal, boot from the clone and clone it back to the HD.

External Firewire-HDD only works in Win7 after Reconnect

Hello,
I use a 27" iMac with BootCamp 4.0 and Windows 7 64-bit. I connect an external HDD via the iMacs Firewire 800 port using a 9 to 4-pin cable.
This works fine, but only if I replug one of the connectors AFTER I switched the HDD on. Only switching it on take no effect; Windows explorer didn't show it!
I tried already the "OHCI-konformer IEEE 1394-Hostcontroller (Legacy)" drivers but with the same result - I alway have to reconnect the HDD every time i want to use it - gets on my nerves...
Any solution for this?
Thanks a lot!

Windows and FW800 never were supported and even FW400 is weak.
Thunderbolt devices are not hot pluggable and need to be present on startup in most cases.
USB3 is finding its way into Mountain Lion now that some Macs have them, and support in Windows 8, which gives more than enough bandwidth for any hard drive and most SSDs.
You can try a rescan in Storage in Computer Management.
eSATA and USB3 (and of course USB2) work fine with recognizing.

What to set when capturing to an external firewire drive?

When capturing to an external firewire drive that will also be used to edit the video, what do I need to set in the Scratch Disk window? Just the scratch disk? Do I need to also set the waveform cache? thumbnail cache? autosave vault?
Thanks.

Depends on your overall configuration/workflow...but I'll usually set my external for Video Capture/Video Render/Audio Render. Then both cache files to my system drive and my Autosave Vault to the external...unless I have an additional internal or second external. I keep my Project files on the system/startup drive.
When you click on the 'Set' button, it's best to simply select the root of whatever drive you want to use. This alleviates the possibility of uncontrolled heirarchy of 'scratch folders' cluttering up your system. If you select the root, then FCP creates a "Capture Scratch" folder at the root level, and each new project gets it's own folder within the main "Capture Scratch" folder.
Setting your autosave vault somewhere other than where your project file is located, can save your butt, if your system drive (or wherever your project file is located) decides to crash.
Others may do it differently, as I do on occasion...just depends on what drives/Mac I have available at the time.
Hope that helps.
K

How to mount external drives on startup without login?

I have a Mac Mini that runs as a server on my network. It has external FireWire drives attached, and I need them to be mounted at machine startup. By default they do not mount until a user interactively logs in.
There was a fix for this in Tiger, involving a NetInfo setting; but since NetInfo Manager and niutil are now gone, I don't know how to make this work. I can mount the drive manually by sshing into the Mini and using a diskutil mount command, but that is very cumbersome and doesn't make the drive available for startup activities that need to access it.
Tx!
KeS

Create the file
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist
with the following contents:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>
</dict>
</plist>
You can do this with the following command (note: it will ask for your admin password):
sudo cat >/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist <<"EOF"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>
</dict>
</plist>
EOF

External HD as startup disk

Hi. I have an iBook with a rather small harddrive (30 GB with 13.5 of free space). I have a larger USB external HD and I decided to just leave the version of OS X I have on the iBook's HD (10.4.7), and use the external one as a startup disk and have the latest version on it. If I also ever decide to buy Leopard, I will install that on the external harddrive as well.
I am having problems with this though. I copyed the needed folders, such as the OS X system folder and the libary folder, but the external harddrive doesn't appear in the list of startup disks in my system preferences. What gives? Do I have to install the OS onto it? How would I do this?
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

I have the same situation exactly, since I use music applications quite a lot.
I went through several stages of work-arounds to free up some HD space.
1. I-Tunes: I created a new iTunes music folder (from within the application of course, don't try just moving the folder in a finder window) on an external USB Hard drive. whenever the drive is present, the entire library becomes available.
2. Logic Express: I've been using Logic Express for a while, using an external USB drive as the Audio scratch disc. However the application with all its associated loop and sample files takes up around 8GB of space, leaving about 2GB unused space, not a good situation and virtual memory became tight. Safari would run very slow and I started to get "not enough memory" messages from my very overworked hardware. Solution ? an external Firewire drive, to which I cloned the internal HD as mentioned in other posts here.
3. Running Apps: I intended to boot the i-Book from the FW disk, but soon discovered I didn't need to. Applications can be launched from this external HD since all the associated files are available to it in its own domain so to speak I can allocate the iBook HD as my audio scratch disk and transfer the audio files over when the session is completed.
I have yet to fully test how this compares to booting from the external drive, but on first trial it seemed to me because the FW drive runs faster then the start-up process is quicker and other disk related time delays are improved.
Let me know if this works for you.
CE

EMERGENCY need responce External firewire as startup

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