[Langdon]

Are any firewire CDr drives bootable (I have a QPS) on slot loading iMacs or towers with native FW ports?

[tooki]

All Macs with FireWire and AGP graphics (= all FireWire Macs except for blue and white G3's and "Yikes!" G4's) can boot off a FireWire CD drive. But some early firmware versions didn't support it, so just be sure to update your firmware if it doesn't work.

Oh yeah... it won't work by holding down the C key (that's reserved for the internal optical drive), so hold down Option instead. It'll bring up all available boot drives and let you choose which one you want to use.

tooki

[MaxPower2k3]

I have a related question... I'll be getting an external firewire drive soon, and i was wondering if it would be worth making like a 5GB partition on it and installing OS X on it just as a backup. If i did this, that partition would also be bootable via the option key menu on startup, right?

[snct]

Yes; it should work. The 'option key' method is quite slow, but it is Apple's version of a 'bootloader'. So even if you have Linux, or OS 9 installed on part of your HD, the option key method should still work (say, if something goes wrong with your Linux bootloader, for example... ).