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Author Topic: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD  (Read 1596 times)

tyrone shoelaces

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Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« on: June 03, 2025, 03:33:57 PM »

Hey guys, I bought a lacie rugged HD on ebay. It has FW800, FW400, and USB2.0 ports. Seems to work fine, except neither of my macs (a mac mini g4 and an ibook g4) will boot from it. I tried formatting it with drive setup under 10.4, and cloning my 10.4 system disk. seems to go OK, but it won't boot. Shows in startup disk in 10.4, does not show in OF.

I also tried formatting it with drive setup 1.9.2 and dragging a 9.2.2 system folder to it. again, shows up in startup disk, but won't boot. drive is not mounted when system starts up either, have to unplug and replug. the OS9 does show up in OF, but still won't boot.

I know not all firewire drives will boot these old macs, but I figured lacie was a mac centric brand so I was safe. Guess not. Also, I'm using a FW800 to FW400 cable, because that's all I have.

I have not tried to change the hitachi laptop drive to a SSD, but I don't believe it to be the issue at all.

For reference, this is the drive: https://www.ebay.com/itm/326482187313
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ssp3

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tyrone shoelaces

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Re: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« Reply #2 on: June 04, 2025, 05:51:11 AM »

Thanks for the reply @ssp3.. I did check out that page. My drive is a different model drive... Mine is the older USB2.0 triple interface. I'm not seeing any firmware for it online.. Seagate has a firmware page but finds nothing.

I guess what I'm really asking is has anyone been able to boot off one of these? if they just won't, i will stop wasting my time and try to find a 3rd gen ipod or something...

Info on the device from

  Device-1: 3-8.2.4:48 info: LaCie Rugged Triple Interface Mobile Hard Drive type: mass storage
    driver: usb-storage interfaces: 1 rev: 2.0 speed: 480 Mb/s lanes: 1 chip-ID: 059f:100c
    class-ID: 0806 serial: <filter>

Vendor site: https://www.seagate.com/support/creative-pro/lacie-rugged-shock-usb-2/

Thanks
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laulandn

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Re: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« Reply #3 on: June 04, 2025, 07:07:41 AM »

I've got two of those drives and because my tibook's optical drive is fubar, was the only way to install an os on it.  So can vouch that at least some models definitely work. 

I've got multiple partitions with os9, tiger, leopard, and backups of my ibook g4 and tibook on now.  (Was careful to use os9 drive setup when formatting originally so os9 drivers were installed).

One of mine is a 250g and the other is smaller, I believe maybe 120g or 160g.

Let me know how you got the "Info on the device from" you quoted and I can show what my two drives are and compare models.
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tyrone shoelaces

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Re: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« Reply #4 on: June 04, 2025, 07:41:31 AM »

that info was from linux. Below is the info from system profiler in 10.4, and below that the info from silverlining pro 6.5 (https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/lacie-storage-utilities-cd-rom-2004). I had to install silverlining and reboot before it would show this info. prior to that it came up as unknown.

I have it connected with a FW800 to FW400 cable. Not sure if that matters, but I don't have a FW400 cable at the moment.

What I would like to do with this, is exactly what you've done with it. At this point i repartitioned to one partition, just to simplify things.

System profiler:

FireWire Bus:

    Maximum Speed:   Up to 400 Mb/sec

Rugged FW/USB:

    Manufacturer:   LaCie
    Model:   0x0
    GUID:   0xD04B931E0815B1
    Maximum Speed:   Up to 800 Mb/sec
    Connection Speed:   Up to 400 Mb/sec
    Sub-units:
Rugged FW/USB Unit:
    Unit Software Version:   0x10483
    Unit Spec ID:   0x609E
    Firmware Revision:   0x110
    Product Revision Level:   
    Sub-units:
Rugged FW/USB SBP-LUN:
    Capacity:   465.76 GB
    Removable Media:   Yes
    BSD Name:   disk1
    OS9 Drivers:   Yes
    S.M.A.R.T. status:   Not Supported
    Volumes:
Macintosh-HD:
    Capacity:   465.76 GB
    Available:   465.31 GB
    Writable:   Yes
    File System:   HFS+
    BSD Name:   disk1s6
    Mount Point:   /Volumes/Macintosh-HD




Silverlining:

Device Information

                             \A5\A5\A5\A5  Device Information  \A5\A5\A5\A5

Model:  LaCie   Rugged FW/USB   
Version:  \00\00\00\00\E4l\00\00
Uses FireWire data interface.

Total capacity = 500 GB  (500,107,861,504 Bytes)
Total sectors = 976,773,167
Bytes per sector = 512

Name of installed driver:  .LaCieFireWireDiskDriver  (v6.5)
Reference number of Driver:  -71
FireWire bridge Device: Rugged FW/USB\00
FireWire bridge Manufacturer:  LaCie\00
FireWire bridge Model:  Ox934DSB\00 (LSI)
FireWire bridge Version:  1.10\00
FireWire bridge Unique ID:  00D04B,931E0815B1
FireWire VendorID  = D04B

Partition 1
    Name:  Apple
    Type:  Apple_partition_map
    Start block = 1
    Block count = 63

Partition 2
    Name:  Macintosh_SL
    Type:  Apple_Driver43
    Start block = 64
    Block count = 128

Partition 3
    Name:  Macintosh_SL
    Type:  Apple_Driver_ATA
    Start block = 192
    Block count = 128

Partition 4
    Name:  Macintosh_SL
    Type:  Apple_FWDriver
    Start block = 320
    Block count = 224

Partition 5
    Name:  Extra
    Type:  Apple_Free
    Start block = 544
    Block count = 224

Partition 6
    Name:  Macintosh HD
    Type:  Apple_HFS
    Start block = 768
    Block count = 976,772,000

Partition 7
    Name:  Extra
    Type:  Apple_Free
    Start block = 976,772,768
    Block count = 400
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laulandn

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Re: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« Reply #5 on: June 04, 2025, 06:28:56 PM »

Ok, when you mentioned the FW800 to FW400 cable, my knee jerk response was, "That's got to be it!"

But...digging through my tumbleweed tangle of "misc usb and firewire cables" I found I had just such a cable, so I could test exactly that...and it worked fine.

It turned out my second, larger, rugged drive only has backups of Intel versions of MacOS X, so I was unable to test booting from it.  Give me a few days and I can shuffle things around and put a version of Tiger on it.

The first attachment, "drive1.txt" is from System Profiler, booted from Tiger from the ibookg4 partition on the drive itself, for what it is worth.

The second attachment, "drive2.txt" is the same for the larger drive, but the ibook booted from its internal drive (because, as you can see, the three OS's on the drive are Intel only).

(I have a 3rd usb/firewire drive of similar size that has Tiger and OS9 on it that I boot from, but it is a different brand and not Rugged).

Comparing the two files, you can see the manufacturer and device names are radically different, even if the drives themselves look identical, other than their capacity.  Since I don't have Tiger on the larger one, I can't test, but maybe the newer drives have a problem?

One thing to try is to partition the drive, this isn't from actual knowledge on my part, but just a guess it might be a possibility.  There's always the suspicion that older hardware/firmware/os's may have trouble with larger capacities.  Who knows, eh?

The Mountain Lion install I have on the larger rugged is just a backup, so, given a couple days, I can get around to installing Tiger on it to try and boot...
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tyrone shoelaces

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Re: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« Reply #6 on: June 05, 2025, 08:41:23 AM »

wow @laulandn, thanks for the post, and the offer of more research.

Even though I wrote earlier that I didn't think the hitachi laptop drive in this thing was the issue, i swapped it out with a 128GB SSD, which I had previously cloned from my mac mini over usb (most likely in 10.4.11, i don't remember exactly).

Anyway, it now boots from the firewire drive, at least into the 9.2.2 partition. The 10.4 partition tries to boot but gets hung on the gray apple screen.

I'm going to reimage that partition and try again, but it looks like the hard disk was the issue, or an issue anyway... I will report back once i'm done with it.. TY again.

Update: it boots from 10.4 after imaging with CCC. Everything shows up in OF.  Imaged the Leopard install DVD, and that boots too... This is the primary reason I bought this thing, because my macs won't read DVD+R DL.

Now to chop this up into a few more partitions and do what I wanted to, to begin with.

Thanks everyone.
« Last Edit: June 05, 2025, 10:44:37 AM by tyrone shoelaces »
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ssp3

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Re: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« Reply #7 on: June 05, 2025, 10:57:47 AM »

laulandn, so the old Lacie FW Rugged triple interface boots OS9? That is good to know.

Is it this one? See attached pdf.
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tyrone shoelaces

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Re: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« Reply #8 on: June 05, 2025, 10:59:47 AM »

yep, it boots 9 and X on my mac mini g4. After I replaced the 500GB hitachi laptop drive with a samsung 128GB SSD.
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ssp3

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Re: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« Reply #9 on: June 05, 2025, 12:05:07 PM »

So, most probably 192 GB drive size limit for OS9 was the culprit.

Since your LaCie is bus powered, you should take a look at this topic: http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=6800.0
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tyrone shoelaces

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Re: Trying to boot from Lacie FW Rugged HD
« Reply #10 on: June 05, 2025, 02:57:37 PM »

mine will accept a 5V power supply.. But it works fine as bus powered, there is no observable difference.

Mine is the older USB2 version. The USB3 version may be bus power only.
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