Booting Mac OSX off an external drive-PowerBook G3?

[DJANGELFYRE]

Hello all, so I have a 320 gig drive that used to be in a desktop tower but is now in a external drive case and was wondering if theres a way to connect it and boot off of it, its usb so I'd need an adapter to firewire, but im having trouble finding an adapter or cable for usb to the powerbook g3s firewire ports..
So my question is, should I purchase a new hd bay with firewire 400 support and connect it to boot on the g3?

[Philgood]

Yes, because I assume that USB ports on the G3 Powerbook are USB 1.1 so rather slow to boot up from it or do you use some PCMCIA USB 2 card though I don't know if you could actually boot from it. My guess is no.
The firewire HDD case would be the safe option to go and is fast.

[SDG]

You would need a Firewire caddy not just a cable. Firewire and USB are completely different technologies and you cannot just have a Firewire to USB cable without a converter box in between, which if it could be found would cost more than a Firewire hard disk enclosure and cable.

[IIO]

please never use a firewire to usb adapter for media. it wont work and can damage your computer.

booting into OSX from firewire would work, but you cant install OSX onto a firewire disk. (unlike OS9)

so alltogether it seems to be a bad idea.

[SDG]

booting into OSX from firewire would work, but you cant install OSX onto a firewire disk. (unlike OS9)

From the sounds of it, OP has a Pismo and I can't see any reason why you cannot install OSX onto an external FW drive. I've done it plenty of times to test drives out etc. The only Mac, to my knowledge, with a non-bootable FW port is the B/W PowerMac G3.

[IIO]

really. i have never seen a PPC where you could choose a firewire drive from an OSX installer, so i am under the impression that it generally doesnt work.

the only way to put a 10.4 onto a firewire disk usually is to clone the install DVD onto the HD and then boot and run the installer from there.

i am unsure about the exact reason.

[SDG]

Firewire is baked into the Pismo. You can start the Pismo in FW TDM. I think you are confusing FW with USB, which generally isn't supported as a bootable medium in PPC Macs but can be coaxed to work from OF.

[IIO]

i think you are confusing a few things here.

[SDG]

the only way to put a 10.4 onto a firewire disk usually is to clone the install DVD onto the HD and then boot and run the installer from there.

I'm admittedly confused about the above. What is that meant to achieve apart from skip the optical drive?

Here, just for you, I grabbed my 17" PBG4 just to show you how Apple makes it easy to do.



I attached a FW drive and booted up from a retail Leopard DVD. Once in, I used Disk Utility to partition the drive with APM



After that finished I just continued with installation and the Installer saw the FW drive as bootable medium and therefore suitable for installation



And that is all there is to it. No hacks, no jiggery-pokery. FW is just as supported as the IDE bus for booting OSX volumes on a PPC Mac. Except for the B/W PowerMac G3. That Mac was a mess.