[Dr.Michael]

Hello,

I have a good offer for an old clamshell iBook without firewire (graphite se 366 MHz with usb).

I would like to use it as a server and it would be nice to have access to a bootable external hd via firewire.


This model is without firewire and I asked myself if it could be possible to use a firewire pc card instead of the airport card. First this sounds funny. But if the airport card were a normal pcmcia card there is no reason why the controller cannot handle any other pcmcia card like firewire etc.

Does anyone know or has already tried this and can give a report?

[tooki]

The AirPort slot is not a PC Card slot. It almost is, but it runs only a subset of the PC Card standard.

I have experimented with non-AirPort cards in an AirPort slot. The only one that worked was a Lucent WaveLAN silver card, since that card is the one the original AirPort card is based on. All the other cards I tried weren't even seen by the computer.

Besides, you couldn't fit the FireWire card inside there. There's not enough room for the part of the card that normally protrudes from the slot!

On top of it, I don't know whether a Mac can boot from any FireWire that's not on the motherboard. I doubt it, considering that not even all Macs with FireWire can boot from their on-board FireWire!

tooki

[ChrisF]

Originally posted by tooki:
On top of it, I don't know whether a Mac can boot from any FireWire that's not on the motherboard. I doubt it, considering that not even all Macs with FireWire can boot from their on-board FireWire!

They can't.

[ghporter]

What Tooki said. Custom hardware based on common hardware, but it absolutely won't work with a firewire card. The AirPort slot is tailored specifically to the AirPort card, which is built ONLY to handle networking calls.

Sorry.

[Dr.Michael]

Thanks