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AJ Muni

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 4, 2005
1,153
24
Miami
Im thinking of getting one, but im a lil confused..... for example if i get one, am i going to boot from the external or from my pb??? or is the external just going to be like another disk thatll show up in my desktop...and ill just get files from it. for example...say i have 20,000 songs in my external and i wanna play them in itunes...do i have to add them to my pb?? or do they load up in the drive with itunes?? im confused.... :confused: :confused:
 
it's pretty much just like a partition in easy words. you can have itunes directly play songs from your external without importing them onto your powerbook. if you want an external drive that boots into osx you need one with firewire support. check out lacie's website they have everything you need and much much more. i personaly went with the triple interface d2 160gb it's not very portable since its a big honker imho.
 
You will boot from your "PB" mostly but you can also boot from your external if you have a Mac OS installed on it (handy if you have Disk Warrior or Tech Tool installed as well), the choice is yours. Yes the external HD will show up on your desktop and you will get/send files to it if you want to and as the previous poster said there is no need to duplicate your songs.
 
from a user whos had to many sleepless nights at a computer to all-
one thing i do with my external 250gb FW 800 drive (which saved me yesterday), is i have it in 3 partitions, one at 60 gb as a weekly clone of my whole HD, one at 15gb as a nightly clone of my home folder, and the rest left for storage.
it saved me yesterday because i take a math class online (windows only applications), had a midterm due at midnight, and had made the mistake of updating virtual pc, which then asked for it's serial number again which is god-knows-where. after 30 mins of frantic rummaging for the VPC box and one large epiphany, i just plugged in the external, restarted my mac holding down option (brings up the boot-from-which-drive-? menu), picked the 4 day old clone of my hard drive, and booted from it. it was like going back in time 4 days! a couple of downloads were back on the desktop, i had 4 days worth of email to redownload, and, last but not least, virtual pc was obedient.
after doing my trig test (96% thankyou) i copied the few documents from my powerbook's internal HD to the external HD to get it back up-to-date, cloned the now-up-to-date-but-with-working-VPC external HD back to my internal, and it's like nothing ever happened. catastrophe averted.

fyi: the tool I use to clone is called carbon copy cloner. you cant just copy it yourself because computers are complicated and it wont boot.
 
chaos86 said:
from a user whos had to many sleepless nights at a computer to all-
one thing i do with my external 250gb FW 800 drive (which saved me yesterday), is i have it in 3 partitions, one at 60 gb as a weekly clone of my whole HD, one at 15gb as a nightly clone of my home folder, and the rest left for storage.
it saved me yesterday because i take a math class online (windows only applications), had a midterm due at midnight, and had made the mistake of updating virtual pc, which then asked for it's serial number again which is god-knows-where. after 30 mins of frantic rummaging for the VPC box and one large epiphany, i just plugged in the external, restarted my mac holding down option (brings up the boot-from-which-drive-? menu), picked the 4 day old clone of my hard drive, and booted from it. it was like going back in time 4 days! a couple of downloads were back on the desktop, i had 4 days worth of email to redownload, and, last but not least, virtual pc was obedient.
after doing my trig test (96% thankyou) i copied the few documents from my powerbook's internal HD to the external HD to get it back up-to-date, cloned the now-up-to-date-but-with-working-VPC external HD back to my internal, and it's like nothing ever happened. catastrophe averted.

fyi: the tool I use to clone is called carbon copy cloner. you cant just copy it yourself because computers are complicated and it wont boot.
Are you sure you're posting in the right thread as you would confuse and frighten the be'jeysus out of me with a reply like that, all the person wanted to know was the basics of an external HD. Just pointing it out :)
 
AJ Muni said:
im confused.... :confused: :confused:

Well if you are using a Powerbook first on your list should be a Firewire 800 model which ties in with being able to boot from it & getting a nice speed increase in doing so. You can also boot from a Firewire 400 model but use FW800 your PB allows you.

When booting from the Internal or External drive you always have access to the other drive. (of course you have load OSX on both internal & external drives first)When booting from your PB HD the external HD will show up as an orange icon on your desktop & you can treat it like a folder - move things back & forth manually. If you get a particularly large drive 250gb+ then use Disk Utility to partition it (divide it up) for neatness & security sake. If you do this then each partition will look like a separate drive on your desktop. You can solely use 1 partition as the music folder & point itunes to that partition.

If you decide to keep all your music on the external drive only (instead of the internal PB HD), when it is plugged in you will be able to play the music & when it isn't plugged in you will be able to see the tracks in iTunes but not be able to play them. You don't need to have the songs on your internal drive as long as you know that the external WILL have to be plugged in for you to play your music.

Likewise you can use a backup program (or go manual drag n drop) to backup your other data - documents, pictures etc on a separate partition.

The main choice is Lacie D2 or Maxtor OneTouch II, I use the Maxtor but some people will swear blind to the Lacie. Horses for courses when you get to this level.
 
thanks for all your help guys...i guys when i get it ill post some questions so u guys can help me out...but i got more of an idea now...

p.s good score on ur trig test buddy, but u did confuse the hell outta me!! ;) ;)
 
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