New to daisy chaining my external hard drives need some guidence on this

I have 2; 3.5 inch 7200rpm 1TB hard drives, & bought some external enclosures with firewire ports for them.
what would the steps be to set them up?
some things I cannot seem to get a clear answer for even after Google searches is;
say I have drive A & drive B together, with drive A plugged into the firewire port on my mac & drive B plugged into drive A. If I only need to work with content on drive B, do I have to have drive A running as well? even if I do not need to work with it?
I notice in mac os that devices show up as no names, well if I need to eject my drives how can I tell which is which when they both show up with the same no name? I dont want to accidentally eject the wrong drives in the wrong order.
So to prevent something like this I would like to know if there is a way to get mac os to name each hard drive? say drive A would be called photos & drive B music. Is there a way to get windows to see them with these same names as well as in mac os?
another thing is I have windows xp pro installed through parallels on my mac & would like to work with my daisy chained drives in this as well.
what ever I do I dont want to screw up my drives, I have important data on them.
Message was edited by: Sossity

You can rename the drives to be just about anything you choose. That will help you to make sure that you are disconnecting the correct drive. As for the daisy chaining issue, I have found that even though the enclosures have the ports for this, I tend to see more issues with random disconnects. As near as I can tell, the Firewire port may not be providing sufficient power to drive two 7200 RPM drives at the same time. I personally prefer to use one drive on my FW800 port and a second on my FW400 port. Yes, one of the dries gets a lower bus speed, but for the increase in drive stability, it actually tends to perform slightly better overall since there are fewer drive disconnects under heavy load.
You reference Windows XP and Parallels. Parallels allow you to specify to connect a drive to the Mac OS side, or to the virtual environment running Windows. This is easily managed. If you are referring to Boot Camp, then yes, they will still work, as the Boot Camp drivers you should have installed would have installed drivers for the Firewire port. One other thing to keep in mind is that depending upon how the drives are formatted, you might have read-only access to the drives under one of the two OSes. You can buy/download drivers to give you full read/write access to HFS+ drives under Windows, and similarly for NTFS drives under Mac OS. Also, if you choose to connect the drives to a virtual Windows environment, then they will not be available to your Mac OS unless they are shared from the Windows side.

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Message was edited by: jeanepaul_

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I feel like I'm asking a pretty dumb question. If I were to just drag all my programs out like my Adobe Suite on to my new macbook pro would that work? I feel like that's just too easy and incorrect. Please and thank you.

The Adobe suite can be downloaded free, you dont have to copy it at all, under standard CS6 Adobe rules, if you own the suite, you get 2 computers "activated at any one time" Make sure, if youre not using the older computer, you deactivate the software under the HELP menu in Adobe.
format the new drive in disk utility ......APPLICATIONS.....UTILITIES.....DISK UTILITIES.......select the external drive and format (if its new and empty!!!) under the ERASE button with Mac OSX extended journaled
copy all your important stuff from older computer , pics, files, documents, personal anything.
most of you apps, i ASSUME you bought in the (other than Adobe software, or Office suite, etc etc,..... obviously) in the MAC APP store, so you can reload them on the new computer without copying them , makes things very easy......just open APP STORE, and download what you already bought.
really the only important things , is copy all important work files, documents, pictures, personal ABC...XYZ...... obviously.
the migration is about emails, contacts, etc etc etc, also data, just because you passed it by at the time doesnt mean you still cant do it, go to the SEARCH at menu at top and type in MIGRATION ASSISTANT to do it again , since you passed it by at first .
the only thing you NEED / SHOULD copy is all your personal stuff........Applications need to be reinstall from either ONLINE download,.......or from the MAC APP STORE,........ you cant just copy the apps over (in most cases) and toss them onto the new computer
Nahh, there are no dumb questions, just dumb mistakes because you DIDNT ask any questions, and we all make those here and there.

(New thread) HP SimpleSave md1000h External Hard Drive - Can't Access Files,

New thread on same old unaswered issues from others.
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New to daisy chaining my external hard drives need some guidence on this

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