[muglo] Re: External startup drive

As per Doug's e-mail:

Make sure your granddaughter keeps using the internal drive as her boot 
drive (It's a lot less messy), but, it's always helpful to have an install 
on hand on the external disk.

>From: Lee Dickey
>Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 03:09:00 -0400
>
>My granddaughter has filled the hard drive on her Mac and thinks she
>wants to use an external firewire drive as her startup drive.  Can you
>explain to me how to do this for her?
>
>Some bits of advice I have had in the past:
>(1) make sure the System folder is in the first 8 Gigabytes of the drive
>(2) "Bless" the System folder by dragging some key folder into it.
>
>I suspect that the above information may be out of date.

Correct. The 8 GB limit only applied to the very first generation of G3 Macs 
and the 'blessing' of the System folder is a System 9 issue. OS X is far too 
complicated to allow booting to be controlled by the blessing (or cursing) 
of the System folder.

>I tried to "drag" the System folder to the external drive.  It
>was copied, mostly, but I got the message that some files did
>not get transferred.  I used an admin account to do it.
>The "Startup Disk" program found in the System Preferences
>did not recognize the external drive as a possible
>startup disk.  What do I need to do to get this right?
>
>Lee Dickey

As Doug alluded, this is not the way to install OS X onto any drive.

It is _possible_ to do something like that but you have to know what and why 
you're doing it (usually people use Carbon Copy Cloner for this purpose) -- 
your granddaughter is not a candidate for CCC.

Install OS X onto the FireWire drive using the install disks. Make sure she 
backs up the files from her main computer to the FireWire drive. Also, when 
OS X 10.5 comes out, have her upgrade to that ASAP. Apparently OS X 10.5 
will have an automated back-up software built-in.

PS You can choose the startup volume at power-on/restart by holding down the 
option key until a drive selection screen appears (have some patience while 
your Mac scans for bootable devices).

Eric.


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