Hi, I have no direct experience with running a system on an external drive (FireWire or otherwise). Having said that, the limitation of installing Jag on a partition no larger then 8 Gb located within the first 8 Gb of the disk is applicable ONLY on old world G3's (i.e. Beige machines). In addition, my own main machine has a 80 Gb disk formatted as a single partition and I have had no problems with it. I have another Cube (identical in all aspects) that has a 4 Gb disk formatted into several partitions - I have had nothing but grief with it... As usual, YMMV... > Fran Adams <fran at franadams.com> wrote: > > I'm having difficulty formatting a new seagate 80 gig