OT- can you have a second bootable system drive???

[Joseph Anderson]

Recently, as some of you know, my system drive failed catastrophically and I had to get a new system drive which resulted in several days of downtime. Now i am trying to avoid having that loss of productivity recur.

I am planning to use a firewire external drive as the prime location for my protools session folders, instead of the second internal drive i have been using. would it be possible to have the second internal drive set up as a second system drive that would actually boot if/when the new internal system drive fails, and have a copy of the whole system drive on there? would the os tolerate having two drives in the machine with the complete system drive contents on them? would the computer default to the main drive when loading? would the second system drive boot up if the main system drive failed?

thanks for any suggestions.

Joseph

[where02190]

You sure can. we have a second base OS on our #3 drive (on the otical bus with the Superdrive) for purposes of defraging the system drive wihtout running from disc. We also keep a clean install OS on a partition of our system drive for restore.

You can have a boatload of OS on one mac....

[Joseph Anderson]

thanks a lot, where! that's awesome!

[MeanTown]

Actually this very evening. I just got done taking out the original Mac 10 Gig system drive. So I put it away in fact so it is kind of a backup. Since I didn't erase it. As I just got done upgrading to OSX and ProTools 6.1.1. I left it in their while I loaded the OS's (2 partions OSX & OS9) and software into the new 30 Gbyte system drive.

I removed the original Mac OS drive and put back inside 120 Gb audio drive that was in there before I started my upgrade. Now in the order of 30Gbyte system drive in first position and jumpered as Master and the 120 Gbyte jumpered as slave in the 2nd position.

Important to note that you need a system drive as the first drive and with the jumper on it that makes it a Master and not a slave. After that you can have more OS's on different drives; but you always have to have the first drive in the ATA chain inside jumpered to be a Master and an OS on that one. At least that was how it was explained to me by Apple Tech support.

In use when it boots up at power up hold down the Option key and it will bring you to a screen that lets you choose which OS you want to you use.

In OSX go to Preferences > Startup disk to choose which one is the default to startup automatically if you don't want to use the Option key to choose one on startup.

Hope I got this right. Did I miss anything??

[Dale-c]

I have had as many as four bootable drives ( OS 9 and X) on both my internal drive and my external. Having a backup is a very good idea. You may also consider getting a well configured setup and then use disk copy to make an image of that that you can restore from whenever you have a problem. Carbon Copy Cloner is a great shareware program that will allow you to copy exactly one drive to another for these kinds of things. It is well worth pay $5 for.

Carbon Copy Cloner

[JLMarechal]

...and you could use BootCD to create a bootable CD with the system AND utils like Drive 10 on it. So you could repair the hard drive with more powerful software than Disk Utility.

[Namaste]

That Carbon Copy is one kick-a*s recommendation. Ya'll ought to try it!!!

Namaste,

Joseph