I will not be using this external drive to make a BACKUP of my own computer. Instead, I want to be able to use it for any one of my many mac's (About 15 of them). If one of the computers goes down, I want to be able to plug in the firewire drive, boot holding the Option key, and choose either:
A. Choose my partition with my INSTALL of Tiger, so that I can boot off the external drive into OSX, and copy things from the computer's internal drive to the external one while using the external drive's OS. I realize I could use target disk mode to do this as well, but this way I won't need a second computer.
OR
B. I choose the partition with the image of my Tiger DVD so that if the computer I am troubleshooting refuses to boot and cannot be salvaged, I can reinstall Tiger directly from the source image. Also, installing Tiger off an external hard drive is MUCH faster than going from the DVD (I saw them do this in an Apple Store once). Also, I do NOT want to clone a 10.4.9 copy of Tiger from my Powerbook, because I foresee an issue with driver's if I want to reformat and install onto a G5, for example. I'd much rather install from scratch and then use Software Update to get to 10.4.9.
So, this morning, I reformatted and repartitioned one of my external drives. 10 gig partition labeled OSX Installation, 5 gig partition called OSX DVD Image, and the rest was partitioned for use with data.
My problems: I managed to make an image of my DVD and restore it to the smaller 5 gig partition through disk utility. The image only took up about half of the 5 gig partition. When I reboot and hold Option, I can see the external partition "OSX DVD Image" as a choice to boot from. However, when I click it and try to boot, my firewire drive blinks for a little while trying to boot, then I get the grey screen with spinning icon, but it eventually freezes and I have to do a hard reboot.
Any ideas?
Conrad
A. Choose my partition with my INSTALL of Tiger, so that I can boot off the external drive into OSX, and copy things from the computer's internal drive to the external one while using the external drive's OS. I realize I could use target disk mode to do this as well, but this way I won't need a second computer.
OR
B. I choose the partition with the image of my Tiger DVD so that if the computer I am troubleshooting refuses to boot and cannot be salvaged, I can reinstall Tiger directly from the source image. Also, installing Tiger off an external hard drive is MUCH faster than going from the DVD (I saw them do this in an Apple Store once). Also, I do NOT want to clone a 10.4.9 copy of Tiger from my Powerbook, because I foresee an issue with driver's if I want to reformat and install onto a G5, for example. I'd much rather install from scratch and then use Software Update to get to 10.4.9.
So, this morning, I reformatted and repartitioned one of my external drives. 10 gig partition labeled OSX Installation, 5 gig partition called OSX DVD Image, and the rest was partitioned for use with data.
My problems: I managed to make an image of my DVD and restore it to the smaller 5 gig partition through disk utility. The image only took up about half of the 5 gig partition. When I reboot and hold Option, I can see the external partition "OSX DVD Image" as a choice to boot from. However, when I click it and try to boot, my firewire drive blinks for a little while trying to boot, then I get the grey screen with spinning icon, but it eventually freezes and I have to do a hard reboot.
Any ideas?
Conrad
