[Freeflyer]

Hi,

My wife and I are moving to Brunei this coming week, via 4 weeks in the UK visiting family. During that time, most of our stuff will be in a container en-route to Brunei. We both have powerbooks that will travel with us, and have an external drive that we will clone both hard drives to, along with some backups and extra data.

I'm considering my options in case something really bad should happen (dead drive, powerbook won't boot etc), and would appreciate your opinions of which is the best course.

1, with 2 powerbooks we can firewire connect and boot from the other powerbook. (how do you do this?).
2, set up a seperate basic boot volume on the external firewire drive, with just a simple osx install for testing etc. (Do I have to create a separate partition for this?)
3. Not bother and just take system disks and make sure I'm all backed up.

Appreciate your opinions,

Cheers,

J.

[tooki]

1. You can use Target Disk Mode to turn one PowerBook into a FireWire drive, and then boot the other one from it. Take the PB whose drive you want to boot from, and boot it while holding down T. It'll show a FireWire logo on the screen. Connect the PowerBooks. On the other PowerBook, start up while holding down Option. After a couple of minutes, you'll see all the available boot drives -- including the other PowerBook's. Click on it and press the forward arrow to boot.

2. Yes, you can install OS 9 or OS X (whichever your PowerBooks will boot) on the drive. No special preparation is necessary, provided the drive is already formatted as HFS+ ("Mac OS Extended" format).

3. That is a way to do it, too. But it doesn't give you much protection against damage or theft.

tooki

[Freeflyer]

Thanks Tooki, I'll put a boot volume on the external drive and we now each have a copy of your instructions so that we can boot of each others machines if necessary.

Cheers,

J.