Boot from FireWire HD

[Staxman]

This morning I started SD copying my entire HD to a FireWire HD, told SD to boot from the FW HD when finished, and went out to breakfast. (This was in preparation for upgrading from Jaguar to Tiger.) When I got back I had just a pale-gray screen. I did some experimenting, with the following results:

1) Hands off keyboard while booting up: Pale gray screen, no Apple logo, nothing.

2) Hold down Option key while booting: I have a post somewhere from an OSX listserv that says this should enable me to choose my boot disk. What came up was something that looked like Classic, with a couple of icons. The one on the left showed a clockwise-pointing circular arrow, and the one on the right showed a right-pointing arrow. Maybe this was on the way to working, but after a few minutes of seeing the wristwatch icon, I ran out of patience and rebooted.

3) Hold down Command key while booting: This resulted in the computer booting up just fine. When I went into System Preferences, I saw that apparently SD had set preferences to boot from the FW HD, as I'd asked it to. I booted once more, just to make sure, reset preferences to boot from the internal HD, and booted again.

Am I right in thinking that this shows that the FW HD is bootable? I don't really mind holding down the Cmd key to boot, but it was my understanding that this shouldn't be necessary. What would have happened holding down the Option key if I'd waited longer? In 4 years of Mac ownership, this is my first time booting from anything except the local HD, so I definitely don't claim to know it all! Thanks.

[dnanian]

Hm. When you say you got a wristwatch for a long time, it sounds to me like you have a problem on the FireWire bus or something. Anything else attached?

When you indicated it started up before, did you tell SD! to start from the backup?

[Staxman]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Hm. When you say you got a wristwatch for a long time, it sounds to me like you have a problem on the FireWire bus or something. Anything else attached?

Nothing else attached. If there's a problem w/the FW bus, then I wouldn't think it would matter which keys I hit while booting--unless it was actually booting from the local HD and I didn't know it. Once a Mac is up, is there a way to tell which HD it's booted from?

Originally Posted by dnanian

When you indicated it started up before, did you tell SD! to start from the backup?

Yes. When I was done experimenting for the time being, I went into System Preferences and said to boot from the internal HD. Once I was up again, i ejected (and turned off power to) the external HD.

[dnanian]

Oh, yes it would -- because option-boot gives you a boot menu, and it sounds like it never was able to interrogate all the attached devices.

What partition scheme is the external drive using?

[Staxman]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Oh, yes it would -- because option-boot gives you a boot menu, and it sounds like it never was able to interrogate all the attached devices.

What partition scheme is the external drive using?

I think I'll try option-boot when I'm about to head out on an errand, then let you know what I see when I get back home.

External drive is a 120GB drive w/4 x 30GB OS X-formatted partitions: P1, P2, P3, P4.

[dnanian]

OK, but what scheme -- start Disk Utility, select the drive and look at the bottom right of the window...