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Matthew Attoe · Jun 22, 2004, 04:14 PM

Hi,

I'm about to get a new Lacie 250Gb external hard drive at work, which will be used to backup the contents of 5 G5s in our office.

As the new drive will be bootable, I also want to be able to use it as an emergency boot drive, containing tools such as TechTool Pro 4 and DiskWarrior 3 (which are also on order), in case anything happens to the G5s.

What would be the best way to configure the new drive? I had thought of two partitions - 1 containing OS X along with TTP4 & DW3 (say 10-15gb in size) and the other partition for the purpose of backing up the data.

With the drive configured as above, would I be able to boot from the external hard disc and then run TTP4 and DW3 from the external drive to diagnose / repair the G5 the drive is connected to? I'm pretty sure that DW3 would be okay, because from what I've read you boot from the DW3 CD to perform repairs anyway, but I've also read that TTP4 doesn't like to be run from the CD, but from some special partition that TTP4 creates if you want to perform certain repairs / defrag. But with TTP4 on an external drive, surely this is, in essence, the same as booting from TTP4 secret partition?

I hope I am making sense.

If anyone can offer some advice or pointers, I'd appreciate it.

Many thanks in advance,

Matthew

Randman · Jun 22, 2004, 04:29 PM

Not sure about Tech Tool but if you have a disk of DiskWarrior (and even when you update, you can create a new CD), you're set.
I'd say don't partition at all. You could use CCC and clone a copy of a hard drive to the external as well as using it to backup daily stuff, then use the disks as needed.