Hi all,
Could someone please add their thoughts to my dilemma.
I've been helping a friend boost the performance of an old PPC 1.42GHZ Mac Mini running Tiger with 512MB and 80GB HD - 4200RPM.
I decided to purchase a bootable external hard drive with Leopard. Initially I purchased a 3.5" Western Digital (WD) desktop drive that was 7200RPM (hoping to give a reasonable improvement to the crappy 4200RPM drive in the mac mini) but unfortunately WD drives have issues with being made into a bootable Mac OS X drive (I read this on another forum).
In any event, I purchased a 2.5" Lacie rugged HD (with Firewire 400/800 and USB 2.0). No problem installing and booting into Leopard via firewire on the Mac Mini however herein lies my problem.
As much as I chose the firewire external to be the primary drive in the startup disk (in system preferences), when I turn off the mac mini and then turn it on again, it always boots into the Mac mini's hard disk instead.
The Lacie drive powers itself up via firewire when I connect it to the mac mini even when the mac mini is off, so I would've assumed that all things being equal, the mac mini would look for the Lacie drive before its own if the Lacie is on first?
Lastly, I have done this before with another external firewire drive (albeit it was a desktop drive) and had no issues in booting into the external first on a consistent basis.
My thoughts were to buy a power supply from Lacie and power the 2.5" separately instead of just via firewire. I should add that the drive does come with a power connector but the other end is USB and is meant to only be used if ports are limited.
Your wise thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Could someone please add their thoughts to my dilemma.
I've been helping a friend boost the performance of an old PPC 1.42GHZ Mac Mini running Tiger with 512MB and 80GB HD - 4200RPM.
I decided to purchase a bootable external hard drive with Leopard. Initially I purchased a 3.5" Western Digital (WD) desktop drive that was 7200RPM (hoping to give a reasonable improvement to the crappy 4200RPM drive in the mac mini) but unfortunately WD drives have issues with being made into a bootable Mac OS X drive (I read this on another forum).
In any event, I purchased a 2.5" Lacie rugged HD (with Firewire 400/800 and USB 2.0). No problem installing and booting into Leopard via firewire on the Mac Mini however herein lies my problem.
As much as I chose the firewire external to be the primary drive in the startup disk (in system preferences), when I turn off the mac mini and then turn it on again, it always boots into the Mac mini's hard disk instead.
The Lacie drive powers itself up via firewire when I connect it to the mac mini even when the mac mini is off, so I would've assumed that all things being equal, the mac mini would look for the Lacie drive before its own if the Lacie is on first?
Lastly, I have done this before with another external firewire drive (albeit it was a desktop drive) and had no issues in booting into the external first on a consistent basis.
My thoughts were to buy a power supply from Lacie and power the 2.5" separately instead of just via firewire. I should add that the drive does come with a power connector but the other end is USB and is meant to only be used if ports are limited.
Your wise thoughts would be greatly appreciated.