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- 2001.04.19
The "Read before you install" document on the Mac OS X
install CD says installing Mac OS X on a FireWire or USB drive
is unsupported. That means it doesn't work, right? Nope, it means
your 90 free days of tech support isn't valid. Big difference! If
you're willing to forgo your 90 free days of listening to Muzak,
ahem, 90 free days of Apple phone support, here's how and why you
should install Mac OS X on an external FireWire drive.
A consumer-level system that can run Mac OS X, such as
an iMac, iBook, or G4
Cube, only supports one internal drive at a time. What if you
have lots of important financial documents or a music collection
that took 15 hours to download stored on your internal hard
drive?
If you partition your internal hard drive, as is strongly
recommended for installing Mac OS X on a single drive, all of
your data will be lost. If you install Mac OS X onto your
existing system without partitioning and anything goes wrong, you
could lose all of your data anyway!
But you've got FireWire ports (at least on the latest models)!
When you're ready to buy Mac OS X, get an external FireWire
hard drive with it, they start at around 200 dollars. Here are the
benefits:
No worrying about making backups or partitioning. If you don't
even know what partitioning is, this setup lets you avoid it.
It works just like a second drive. You get to keep all the free
space you have now on your internal drive.
Portability. You can bring your hard drive over to your
friend's house and run Mac OS X on their Mac without having to
install anything on their computer! Great for showing off how great
you are, ahem, how great Mac OS X is.
Performance. Many FireWire hard drives are faster than the one
that came with your Mac. The slowest currently available FireWire
hard drives are about the same speed as the drives shipping in
iBook and PowerBook G4!
The installation process is as easy as installing Mac OS X
on your internal drive, with the driver software needed for
controlling the external drive already built into the OS.
The only known issue occurs after installation with some drives:
You cannot select the FireWire drive in Mac OS 9's Startup
Disk control panel to boot back into Mac OS X - it looks
"grayed out." If this is the case, restart your Mac and hold down
the option key. This opens the Startup Manager. You can then choose
the FireWire drive and click the arrow to continue starting up into
Mac OS X. Updating the Startup Disk control panel to version
9.2 usually solves this problem.
What kind of drive should you use?
I bought a discontinued 6-GB VST Portable FireWire drive for a
decent price. It's neither the fastest drive nor the least
expensive per gigabyte, but I like it because it's cute, because
VST has seamless Mac OS 9.1 support, and because it's powered by
the computer. Almost all currently shipping FireWire hard drives
are advertised as bootable in Mac OS 9.1 and thus work for Mac
OS X as well. Check with the manufacturer if they don't
advertise this feature.
I don't have FireWire on my computer, will USB hard drives
work?
Yes, but they're very, very slow. On average, USB hard drives
are 1/20th the speed of FireWire drives with the same drive
mechanism, or close to the speed of a floppy drive. Veteran Mac
users know that booting off of a floppy takes several times as long
as booting from a hard drive - and that was when the OS could fit
on a 1.4 megabyte floppy. Mac OS X takes up over 1000
megabytes! The only Macs that didn't ship with FireWire ports and
can boot from USB are the 350-MHz
iMacs and the original
iBooks.
Running Mac OS X on an external FireWire drive is just as
easy and responsive as running it on your internal hard drive, with
no problems short of losing that free Muzak. Darn!
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