Fire wire startup disc

Question

OK, I believe I know how to do this, but give me some tips on proceedure and funtionality. I want a partition for the startup volume, for repairs etc, and one to use as a second storage disk, for documents, photos, art projects, and back ups, as I am already doing. Advice please.

Answer 1

Hello,
It sounds like you are wanting to divide or partition your hard drive. Understand that doing this will erase everything on the drive that you are partitioning.
You can repartition your drive with Apple's Disk Utility. Here are the directions for the usual process:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/partitioningtiger.html
To boot from an external hard drive (either USB or FireWire) on an Intel Mac, it must be partitioned and formatted with the GUID partition scheme.
Basically, that is the type of partition table that you are configuring. The other format would be Apple Partition Scheme. That is the format native to PowerPC Macs (bootable on PowerPC systems), and also the format that Intel machines default to for their external drive. But, The Apple Partition Scheme is not bootable on the Intel Machines. So, that is why you need to make sure to use the GUID partition scheme to format the external drive if you want a bootable backup.
It may sound strange, but here's the way the Mac OS partitions the drives by Default:
PowerPC:
Internal Drive: Apple Partition Scheme
External Drive: Apple Partition Scheme
Intel Mac:
Internal Drive: GUID Partition Scheme
External Drive: Apple Partition Scheme
So, you can see that in order to make your external drive bootable on the Intel Macs, you will need to over-ride the default setting and partition it in the GUID Partition Scheme method.
Of course, that will also mean completely losing everything on that drive. So, be sure to back-up anything important on that drive first.
You can read about how to change the partition scheme (when you are re-formatting / re-partitioning the hard drive) in the following articles:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303220
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303609
While those articles are not specifically targeted at this purpose, they do describe the steps necessary to change your partition scheme to GUID.
Then, once the partition scheme is set to GUID, go ahead and choose the Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) format for the actual format.
Obviously, you would be doing the same process twice to follow both tutorials. So, just read over all three tutorials, and then choose the appropriate options as you move through the partitioning process. It is really simple.
I hope this helps.
Let us know if you have other questions.
P.S., if you'd like, go ahead and click the "Helpful" or "Solved" buttons on any of the posts / replies above if you feel they were helpful or adequately answered your question.