Hard Drive question

[Punx]

If I were to buy this Firewire Enclosure:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other...g/MEFW91UAL1K/

Would I be able to install Leopard on the drive I placed in this enclosure
and use it as a bootable system drive? What would be the easiest steps to
do that? The space is on my current system drive is shrinking rapidly and I
would prefer to do it this way if possible. Thanks.

[OddsAre]

it is possible, but I'm not sure if you want to tie up your firewire bus doing that... what machine are you running, seems like there would be a better way...

that is a good drive enclosure, however, and would be a great candidate for an audio external drive.

[OddsAre]

have you thought about getting a dedicated external hard drive for storing all the crap that is building up on your current system drive? Then maybe replacing your system drive with a faster/bigger drive? I assume you are using a laptop so getting a 7200RPM SATA drive loaded in would be a nice upgrade.

[Punx]

I'm running a G4 desktop system. I'm upgrading the processor to a dual 1.6GHz(yes I've already verified it will work in my computer), already have an internal audio drive that is more than big enough. However the HD that came with my computer was only 20GB and now it's getting full. I already tried to clone my current system drive and replace it with another internally, but it didn't work for some reason. Now I need to find a way of booting or creating a system drive externally. I have 4 Firewire ports on my computer so tying up a bus is not an issue.

[OddsAre]

well if all 4 Firewire ports are on the same bus, then it would be an issue. Chances are on those machines back then they would be 2 ports per bus, but I am only guessing.

Here's what I would do, purchase a 250GB FW drive from Macsales.com and transfer all the audio files off your second internal hard drive. Reformat it using Disk Utility and choose the option to "Write Zeroes" to ensure a clean erase. Then install Leopard on it and use that drive as your new Leopard system drive and use the external FW drive as your audio recording drive. Then later on you can work on getting the other drive properly clone using a program like SuperDuper!

Either way your 20GB drive that came with your machine is a pretty old drive, I would be looking to get rid of that ASAP. If you are relying upon it for day to day activities you want to have a nice fresh stable hard drive.

[M.Brane]

Originally Posted by Punx

I'm running a G4 desktop system. I'm upgrading the processor to a dual 1.6GHz(yes I've already verified it will work in my computer), already have an internal audio drive that is more than big enough. However the HD that came with my computer was only 20GB and now it's getting full. I already tried to clone my current system drive and replace it with another internally, but it didn't work for some reason. Now I need to find a way of booting or creating a system drive externally. I have 4 Firewire ports on my computer so tying up a bus is not an issue.

You are lucky that 20GB drive is still alive.

If you give us some more information as to exactly which G4 you have we can better explore the options available. Booting from FW is at the bottom of the list of options IMHO.

BTW I'm running a DA G4 with a dual 1.6 CPU, and SATA drives.