Booting from Firewire drive

[oxfordian3]

I bought a LaCie d2 Firewire 120GB drive and cloned the OS X 10.2.1 system of a G4 Sawtooth from the HD to the LaCie drive. I used Carbon Copy Cloner and made the copy "Bootable." This all went fine and the Mac OS X 10.2.1 Lacie drive is listed among the Preferences' list of Startup Disks.

When I restart with the Option key, then both the HD and the LaCie are displayed for selection. I can choose either drive and successfully boot from it.

However, I can't get the LaCie drive to show up when the G4 is Off and I power it On. I use the Option key, but only the HD shows up on the screen for selection.

Anyone encounter this problem or know of a fix?

 

[oxfordian3]

Answered my own question

I may as well post the answer I worked out myself. Although the LaCie drive powers up automatically when the G4 is powered, the timing is such that it is not powered and mounted early enough to be included in the list of available boot volumes. If I manually power up the LaCie before the G4, then the LaCie appears in the boot volume list.

 

[rainman::|:|]

welcome to the wonderful world of power-on sequencing. on many systems with many peripherals, devices have to be turned on in exactly the right timing, or all hell breaks loose. Can you just leave the hard drive on? Just the case's fan should be spinning...

paul

 

[oxfordian3]

Powering off

There doesn't appear to be a way to prevent the LaCie d2 from powering down when the computer powers down. I can manually turn it on (as I mentioned) before powering the G4, and I could dismount the volume (on the desktop) and then power it down before turning the G4 off, but I don't see a way to keep it on when the G4 shuts down. It was apparently designed to simplify the process for the user by linking the power on-and-off with the computer by default. That's all fine with me -- although I am still new to managing external drives and paranoid about frying one by mishandling it.