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View Full Version : Booting from a FW HDD Q's



LethalWolfe
Mar 7, 2004, 11:49 AM
Is it as reliable as booting from an internal HDD or is it quirky at times? How do you tell your Mac to boot from the external drive instead of the internal one?

Obviously I'm not experienced w/this so if people could post their experiences and the pro's/con's of booting from FW I'd appriciate it. :)


Lethal


Rower_CPU
Mar 7, 2004, 01:13 PM
I haven't had any issues w/ booting from FW drives at all in my lab or at home. It's a pretty smooth process.

You use Startup Disk in System Prefs to choose th FW drive, just like you would to boot back and forth between 9 and X.
sonofslim
Mar 7, 2004, 01:33 PM
it's maybe a snidge slower at times. but like rower said, it's a smooth process. your biggest potential problem is in the hardware itself -- some cheaper firewire bridges can be a little glitchy.
LethalWolfe
Mar 7, 2004, 02:23 PM
Cool. Tell me if, for whatever reason, my plan doesn't sound doable. My G4 is my editing machine and it is currently running 10.1.5 and FCP 3. I've had constant projects on this machine and that's why I haven't upgrade. Now, I still have on-going projects in FCP 3 and I don't want to switch horses mid-stream but I'm seeing more and more requests for FCP 4 specifically so I was thinking of buying Panther and the FCP 4 upgrade and installing those on a FW drive. And then once I was done w/my current FCP 3 projects I would transition completely over to Panther. Sound plausible?


Lethal
Rower_CPU
Mar 7, 2004, 03:01 PM
Yup, sounds great. Just use CarbonCopyCloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html) to move your Panther content over to the internal drive once you're set to upgrade.
whocares
Mar 7, 2004, 03:03 PM
You can also choose which boot drive you use by holding down the option key upon boot (like swithching from X to 9).

I have an iBook and a FW HDD (7200rpm), and it's actually quicker when I boot from the FW drive...
LethalWolfe
Mar 7, 2004, 03:09 PM
Yup, sounds great. Just use CarbonCopyCloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html) to move your Panther content over to the internal drive once you're set to upgrade.


And that answers my next question. :)


Lethal