Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 08, 2002 2:43 PM |
powderhaus |
The firewire hard drive works fine in both OS9 and X but is there a way to start up off of this drive?? Xpostfacto tells me this is not a bootable device and when i installed OS9 i could not start up on it it would just start on the other drive. Help! |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 20, 2002 3:26 PM |
brfransen |
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Cool, thanks ivanxgz! I checked with my dad and he has never tried booting from his firewire drive. My bad. Britney |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 18, 2002 3:52 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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B/W g3 does NOT support firewire booting. |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 17, 2002 1:24 AM |
ivanxqz |
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Britney, 'Strue. I had one myself. In the Startup Disk control panel you see the FireWire drive, but it is dimmed out and unselectable. Apple confirms this at: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58606 in which they say "FireWire booting is possible on all Macintosh models that have built-in FireWire ports with the exception of the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White) and the Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) models." Thus I wouldn't think it possible to boot on Old World machines from FireWire drives at all, but I don't know for sure, since I've never had a FireWire PCI card and I don't know exactly what they can or can't do; I would assume they require drivers to be recognized, but again, I don't have any idea. All I know is that I can't boot my PowerBook from my FireWire Cardbus card ;-) |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 12, 2002 10:56 AM |
brfransen |
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ivanxgz, Really? My dad has a B&W and I belive that he has booted from a Firewire drive in the past. I will have to ask him to be sure. Britney |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 12, 2002 10:11 AM |
ivanxqz |
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Just to clarify a point mentioned here, while it is true that the B& W G3's were the first machines to have built-in FireWire, even those don't support booting from it. I am not sure which machines were the first to do so, but I know that the B&W's can't. |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 11, 2002 6:58 AM |
nick.ashton |
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Ryan, I had a think about what you said about keeping the Firewire & "helper" drives synchronized. One solution is to do what I do when mounting an alternate drive to act as a swap device. In the startup scripts I check if the alternate swap drive is available & if so I use that, otherwise I proceed with the normal sequence & use the system disk for swapfiles. A possible approach is to have a fully bootable system on the "helper" drive & check for the existence of the Firewire disk at the appropriate moment. When installing a system update, do it first when booted from Firewire then reboot with the Firewire disconnected & apply the update to the system on the helper drive. I don't think that the majority of updates would have to be applied to the helper disk - probably only those where a new version of the kernel, extensions or BootX was involved. A second approach would be to use CCC, or a custom applescript, to copy the essential parts of the updated Firewire system back to the helper disk. I'm sure there are utilities available that let you compare directories under OS X & apply changes from one to the other. Anyway, time permitting, I'll have a go at switching drives in mid-boot & let you know the results. |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 10, 2002 11:10 PM |
powderhaus |
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is there a way to check to see if the card has the proper drivers? b ecause I just got a firewire drive and copied all my stuff to it a nd it works fine (no for booting it just said can't open PCI bridge f ollowed by some numbers) it did speed everything up a little because everything except the system is running off of it. and I know if the system was running off of it I would see an even bigger speed increase |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 10, 2002 1:22 PM |
OSXGuru |
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I spent a bit of time the other day trying to figure out if there was any way to boot from a FireWire drive attached to a FireWire card. In theory, there would be nothing preventing that if the FireWire card had the appropriate Open Firmware drivers (just as the ATA cards and the SCSI cards need to have in order to be bootable). The problem is that the Firewire cards I have installed just don't have the appropriate Open Firmware drivers for this purpose. I suspect that none of them do, but it would be nice to be wrong. nick.ashton is correct--there would be a way to set up the boot process so that the Open Firmware stage is handled by a "helper" drive, and the rest of the boot process happens on the Firewire drive. The tricky thing would be to keep the two drives synchronized when doing installations etc. The problem is that once Mac OS X has booted, it would consider the Firewire drive to be the root volume, and would not be aware of the helper drive. So any new kernel extensions that are installed (or kernel updates) would go to the Firewire drive, and not the helper drive. Which would create problems the next time you reboot. So some mechanism would be required to guarantee that they are synchronized. It is a problem that can be solved, I suspect, but it is a little messy. |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 09, 2002 11:14 AM |
powderhaus |
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yeah i know but i was thinking about it and it does not seem like it would be that hard to creat a patch for it. but then i have no programing expearence so it may be harder than it seems. |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 09, 2002 11:12 AM |
nick.ashton |
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Here's a little question which Ryan may be able to answer :- In order to support CD-ROM drives which are not handled by Open Firmware Ryan added the capability for BootX to access these drives without referring to OF. I was just wondering what would be involved in either doing the same for a FireWire drive or is it possible to perform the early stages of the boot process using a kernel on a SCSI drive & then switch to FireWire when remounting the filesystems read/write. The closest I can currently get is to create a minimal system on a bootable drive & then have all the rest of the file systems (/private, /usr, /System, /Library ...) mounted on separate partitions on a FireWire drive. But it's very messy to set up & results in lots of separate partitions to form the operating system. |
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RE: Firewire Hard Drive |
August, 09, 2002 7:56 AM |
brfransen |
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If I remember correctly Firewire is not bootable on old world machines. The B&W G3 was the first machine to have built-in Firewire and I think the first that you could boot from firewire. Britney |
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