[iBook] External F/W Drive no longer boots

[Keith Parker]

Hi All,

A few days ago my iBook stopped sleeping and the call to Applecare 
resulted in the Tech person telling me to "archive and install", which 
I did, it didn't change the sleeping issue. It did cause me to have to 
make lots of changes to the configuration to get back to where my 
system was before.

That's about when I noticed that my external 80gig F/W drive stopped 
booting. I was trying to maintain this drive as a security backup in 
case my iBook stopped working, I could move the external drive to my G4 
350MhZ and have all of my files and applications intact.

I have since formatted the external drive and re-installed the OS 
10.2.1 and copied my main "user" over and then ran the 10.2.8 combo 
updater trying to get it back to a bootable condition, but no luck.

When I hold down the "option" key at startup and select the external 
drive, then clicking on the "right arrow" to continue, the computer 
screen changes to the white background with the grey apple in the 
center and gets hung-up there.  In addition, the external F/W drive 
fails to mount, when booting from the internal drive, and must be 
turned off and back on to mount on the Desktop.

I'm thinking about using Carbon Copy Cloner to see if I can get a 
bootable system on the external drive, but I'd like to ask everyone 
about other possible solutions first.

Thanks for your time !

Keith Parker