What determines bootability on a FW drive?

Info?

Jag or Panther? Did you partition the drive with Disk Utility? If so, did you select "Mac OS Extended" under the "Format" selection? With Panther, it would be "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". You can't boot from UFS, as far as I know.

Though I have little firsthand experience with this (I've only tried it a couple of times, and it always worked), I'd guess that it could stem from the drive's Firewire firmware.

If there is some particular command or action whose support is required to boot from a Firewire drive, and that particular drive's firmware does not include it, then it wouldn't work. I know this is, or at least has been, true of some CD readers (not external--internal), and I see no particular reason it might not also be the case with Firewire.

That said, I haven't heard of others with the same problem unless something else was wrong, so I'm not sure.

Two other questions that I wasn't entirely clear on from your post:

1) Did you try holding down the option key at startup and selecting the drive from the icons that appear? If it's a timing issue, this might work where the Startup Disk prefpane fails.

2) Did you try cloning a working install to the drive using CarbonCopyCloner, with the "make bootable" flag checked in the preferences? That'd ensure that you have a working system on the disk.

Originally posted by beerguy
I've tried both of the items you listed - no love.

I CAN boot from my iPod so I don't think it is a problem with the iMac.

Click to expand...

You mean like the iPod still works as a music player? Or did you do a erase and install. I put panther on my iPod, but it wouldn't start up, it just got to the gray Apple, and the little gear just spun and spun and spun.

I agree that it sounds like your FW firmware doesn't support booting. Try the option key during boot, as mentioned above. If the drive doesn't show up, I think you're hosed. Maybe look for a firmware update from your FW drive vendor.

Originally posted by beerguy
The "official" word that I just got back from their Tech Support folks:




Apparently just because the product documentation says that it's bootable doesn't mean that it is. Can you spell "Fraud?"

The brand name of the drive is "Acom Data" and is stocked by at least Best Buy and CompUSA.

Avoid them like the plague.

If I can find my reciept this b@stard is going back to BestBuy.

Cheers

Click to expand...

Acom Data.. I'll write this name down somewhere on my mind.. this is riddiculous.. I hope you can solve it by bringing it back...

Booting from an iPod

I also used CarbonCopyCloner to make my iPod bootable, and it didn't interfere with it's "iTune-ability". I did remove the iTunes folder from the backup list, though, because 1) there's no point in doubling up the backup; and 2) it would've thrown me over the 20GB size.

Admittedly it was a SLOW-W-W boot device. But it did let me repartition hard disk - twice (long story, I won't bore you with it).

I've left the iPod bootable (although with only a subset of my apps and files on it), since my music collection doesn't really need that much space.

It's definitely a nice little tech-toy.