Making a bootable disk image of Disk Warrior on an external firewire...

[mach1andy]

The other day, a friend's powerbook refused to start-up and I used Disk Warrior 4 to bring it back to life. I found this program to be really valuable but I'm not going to bring a disc with me everywhere I go.

I am curious as to how you can get the DiskWarrior program disk as a partition on an external hard drive so that if this happened again (and i had my nifty external with me) I could boot from it and fix any issues.

Does anyone know how to do this? My guess would be to go into Disk Utility and make a new image of the disk and then drag it onto a partition on the external drive but i'm not really sure what format (.iso, .bin, .cue) to use.

 

[nagromme]

I tried two methods for making my iPod bootable:

1. Manually drag all the files from the bootable volume (my HD) to the iPod. This actuallt worked! But the next time it didn't This method is fast but unreliable.

2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner. (See versiontracker.com) SLOOOOW... but it gets all the invisible files and makes a good, bootable copy.

Of course, your external destination drive must be formatted properly too.

Note that my source was not a CD--but still I think CCC should do the job.

 

[wickedsteve]

Just make a bootable drive and install DW onto it. It doesn't need to be booted off the DW disc to work. I have DW3 installed on my Mac and it works on any other drive I plug into it. It just can not fix the current boot drive. If I need the primary drive fixed I just boot from another drive with DW on it.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Just make a bootable drive and install DW onto it. It doesn't need to be booted off the DW disc to work. I have DW3 installed on my Mac and it works on any other drive I plug into it. It just can not fix the current boot drive. If I need the primary drive fixed I just boot from another drive with DW on it.

The point of using the System on the DW disk is that it automagically works to boot almost all Macs. If you use the OS of a particular Mac to install on a FW external, there's a chance it will not boot a different model line of Mac.

 

[mach1andy]

so it sounds like the disc is really clutch... I would have thought that a partition on a firewire disk would achieve the same thing-- but faster-- and less prone to scraches.