Sys Backup of OS8.6, g4 to USB Fat32?

[KítscheñÇinqµe]

Seems I need only copy system folder to bckup the os. However will there be problem copying to USB 2.0 external drive (fat32)?
If I !#$@!# the OS, and then need to reinstall, how to do reinstall? I doubt i can drag the copy of sys folder from usb to a "blank" g4 hard drive. Would I make a boot disk?
The g4 has cdrom and zip100, no floppy. I'd have to burn a boot cd on winxp. I've never read anything about bootable zip carts (so seems unlikely possible).

Minor endnotes:
AGP G4, mfr 1999, so likely has USB 1.1 (or 1.0?), but this shouldn't matter. Just slower.

this is a $4.27 question, therefore deserving of at least $0.02 answers (thanks...)

 

[dolphin842]

Alight, here's my $0.02 (i.e. mostly uninformed) answer:

Classic Mac OS seemed to be reliant IIRC on resource forks. Anyone here know if those get preserved in the move to the new filesystem? An answer to that question would likely go a long way toward confirming or denying the safety of such a backup method.

 

[velocityg4]

You would be better off formatting the external to HFS to better avoid problems. Also I do not think the System can be simply copied. As I recall just like in OS X their are hidden files in the root directory that must also be copied.

Also to be bootable the System Folder must be blessed.

"Blessing" the system folder, by the way, consists of altering the boot block so that it knows the ID of the system folder. The reason this is necessary is that the system folder on a "classic" Mac OS disk needn't be called "System Folder." It might be named in another language besides English, for example. So the bootloader was designed not to care what it's called but rather to locate it by ID. The easiest way to bless a system folder using "classic" Mac OS is to move the Finder out of it, then back in -- the running Finder will say "ah, here is a Finder and a System file in the same folder, must be the system folder" and bless it. Mac OS X has a bless command-line tool that can do the blessing. When burning a CD, most burn software will either automatically find the system folder and alter the boot blocks on the resulting CD accordingly, or else there is a checkbox to make it do this (this is how Toast does it).