External FW hard drive and booting in OSX

[thomasp]

Hi all!

I'm thinking of buying an external hard drive for my 1.5GHz PowerBook, running OSX 10.4.5 (soon to be 10.4.8!). The main reason for buying this HD is for backing up my internal drive and being able to boot from the external one in case of system failure/update going pear-shaped, while I'm at uni and away from my installer DVDs.

Naturally, I'd buy a FW drive (not sure whether to go for FW400 or FW800...), but would like quite a "rugged" one (LaCie do some nice ones). My question is:

If I buy a bus-powered FW drive (no mains lead), can I still boot from it, assuming the OS is installed? Or does it have to be mains-powered?

Also, I assume you can boot from a FW800 drive as you can a FW400 drive?


Finally, to boot from an external drive, do you just hold down a certain key during startup? If so, what's the key?!


Thanks for the help

 

[Silentwave]

to boot from a bootable external FW drive (like a FW drive cloned by superduper) you just hold down the T key during startup to enter target disk mode, or hold down the option key to select your boot volume.

 

[telecomm]

to boot from a bootable external FW drive (like a FW drive cloned by superduper) you just hold down the T key during startup to enter target disk mode, or hold down the option key to select your boot volume.

How would target disk mode help here? I think the shortcut he's looking for is option-command-shift-delete.

See here for more shortcuts.

 

[thomasp]

Thanks for the replies.

Does anyone know if bus-powered FW drives are bootable? (ie: drives that don't have a mains power supply)

 

[telecomm]

Does anyone know if bus-powered FW drives are bootable? (ie: drives that don't have a mains power supply)

Yup, do it regularly myself.