[P1] External Firewire HD

[Richard McKay]

Mark D. Chapman wrote the following:

> I am planning to buy an external Firewire HD (or a HD case) for my
> ibook. I would like to be able to boot from that drive.
> 
> How do I know if a drive or case is bootable?
> 
> Is this related to the Oxford 911 (?) chipset people recommend.

Mark,

AFAIK, you can boot from any attached HD that the iBook will recognise (and
obviously it will need to also have a functioning OS installed). The
differences between models of HD's and Cases are mostly one of looks,
performance (this is where the oxford chip counts=faster than others for
transfer rates), amount of space and cache, type of comms connections (i.e.
USB, Firewire and soon USB2) as well as price.

The only difference the OS makes about what volume to start from is in
system prefs under startup disk. Or you can use a keyboard shortcut to
determine what system to start from at boot time. I've not tried it but I
imagine that one could even start from a network volume (i.e. ethernet or
airport...anyone tried this?)

HTH,

Cheers,

Richard
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