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ChadC · Aug 9, 2003, 10:19 AM

Is it possible to boot up from an external FireWire CD Drive? My internal drive is dead and I need to boot off o a cd.

Thanx Much,
Chad

zachs · Aug 9, 2003, 11:58 AM

Not possible, unless you have an external power supply for your drive. The drive is not mounted much until later in the boot sequence.

Art Vandelay · Aug 9, 2003, 12:28 PM

Sorry, but you are absolutely wrong. OpenFirmware can power and mount all devices immediately. I've used several bus-powered FireWire CD and HD drives to boot from.

You can hold Option and choose the CD in the Startup Manager.

CharlesS · Aug 9, 2003, 01:46 PM

You can boot from any FireWire drive, as long as the drive supports booting. Some older devices don't, but I think that most modern FireWire drives do support booting. I have three FireWire drives, and I've booted from all of them. One of them is a Lite-On 52x/24x/52x CD-RW drive which I boot from all the time to test boot CD's.

So the bottom line is, it's highly likely that you will be able to boot from your external drive. Only way to find out for sure, though, is to try it.

ChadC · Aug 9, 2003, 01:58 PM

Hey guys thanx for the quick respones! I was able to boot off of my external CD drive(SmartDisk CD/RW) but I wasn't able to boot from my Peerless 20 gig, but I think that is because I got it when FireWire was very new. In any case tho, I don't need to boot off the Peerless, just the CD Drive and it works!

Thanx,
Chad