ibook G4 questions

[littlemary]

Hi, I am a mac newbie and also new to MacRumors. This is a great forum and I visit it often. The advice is very helpful.

I have an ibook g4, 1.2 ghz, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB hard drive and Mac OS X 10.4.11.

I want to purchase an external hard drive so I can copy the mac tiger operating system on this drive to make it a bootable drive. Is this possible?

Also, any advice on which external hard drive to purchase for this purpose?

I also want to back up my ibook g4 to an external hard drive. Do I need to purchase a separate drive or can I partition one hard drive to do both tasks?

Another forum explained how to back up my ibook to an external hard drive by using Time Machine. However, I cannot locate Time Machine on this ibook g4. Any suggestions?

I plan to add 1GB RAM. What are your thoughts on external hard drives vs upgrading the internal drive?

Should I get an external DVD/RW or opt for an internal superdrive?

Any information you can provide will be helpful

Thanks!!!!

 

[Zotaccian]

Here is instructions regarding cloning:

http://lowendmac.com/ed/royal/08sr/clone-mac-os-x.html

Time Machine was introduced in OS X 10.5 called Leopard so it is one version up from what you now have.

Internal optical drive is very hard to replace in iBooks (requires lots of disassembling), but there are instructions at iFixit.com.

 

[Intell]

You can clone your internal disk using CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to an external drive and boot it either via USB or FireWire. Time Machine is only available on 10.5 and newer. A newer internal drive would be best for speed and show a great improvement over the current drive. Make sure you get a PATA/IDE/EIDE one. Compatible internal SuperDrives for that iBook are fairly cheap, but they're limited to only being used on that machine. An external one could be used long after the iBook has died.