Using external FW as primary drive?

[sirslacker]

I have an old 400 mhz G4 30 gig HD powerbook that is ready to go to the recycling bin in the sky. It has a short so everytime I move it, the system locks up. I have it on an iCurve stand on my desk with external keyboard, etc. Lately it's starting to have starting issues, such as a black screen on startup but with the laptop starting up normally. I'm sort of paranoid about loosing work. Is it possible to use an external (80 gig) portable firewire drive as my primary volume? That way if my laptop died I could boot from my external firewire on my wife's laptop. Also, would it make a difference what speed firewire I had, or is the main speed bottleneck in the transfer rate of the actual cable? The internal drive is 4200 RPM and I have an external Lacie D2 that runs at 7200 RPM. Thanks!

 

[jmgalvin]

You do not need a boot drive to use another mac. You can backup your files, plug the firewire drive into your wife's machine and you're good to go. If she uses osx, it might be best to set up a new user - you - on your wife's machine.

A boot volume does not necessarily work from one computer to another unless they're the same model - Rom and other problems might ensue.

 

[jimoblak]

Is it possible to use an external (80 gig) portable firewire drive as my primary volume?

This depends on the OS version and the type of computer you have. I have the ability to use my iPod as an external firewire boot drive on my iMac.

I would suspect that this might boot faster if the internal drive is only 4200 rpm. Firewire, no matter what version, might be zippier than the internal drive.

- - picklefish - -
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