Leopard will not boot from Firewire HD

Try again but using the GUID partition type.

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Unfortunately, Acomdata's record on the matter isn't quite clean*:
http://www.macmaps.com/firewirebug2.html

My recommendation, swap out the hard drive case and put another one in its place around the hard drive that is known to be compatible. The only two companies I know of are http://www.macsales.com/ and http://www.cooldrives.com/

There may be others you can write to on the above FAQ*. The problem is not all Firewire nor USB drives are bootable.

Another thing you may be running into is that if you want to use the keyboard to startup from an external drive, you may need an Apple keyboard to be certain the C or Option keys work. Option key should work if you have the right keyboard:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106178

Finally, Time Machine is not a bootable backup, but does backup everything. Currently only Carbon Copy Cloner, and Apple's Disk Utility offer bootable backups of Leopard.

- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Leaving FW devices attached during an install can sometimes cause problems. Try installing Leopard to your internal drive and clone it to an external bootable partition using Carbon Copy Cloner. That worked well for my PPC Mini.

I have three old Maxtor drive that I use for odds and ends and even TM on my G5. They are all FW drives.
The instruction books for all three specifically state that they are not bootable, Mac or PC.
I imagine part of the bootablility of a drive is in the firmware.
My LaCies boot fine.

Nerowolfe,
You are correct. Essentially what my link shows is that each manufacturer has a choice of either installing firmware that is provided by the bridge board, or developing one of their own for their needs.
Unfortunately, most choose the latter, making it extremely different short of personal experience to know the bootable, and safe drives to use during a Mac OS X update from the ones that won't do either.

Message was edited by: a brody

a brody wrote:
Nerowolfe,
You are correct. Essentially what my link shows is that each manufacturer has a choice of either installing firmware that is provided by the bridge board, or developing one of their own for their needs.
Unfortunately, most choose the latter, making it extremely different short of personal experience to know the bootable, and safe drives to use during a Mac OS X update from the ones that won't do either.

Message was edited by: a brody

As you may have noted, I always say a tested bootable clone now, after the failure of Silverkeeper to produce a proper bootable clone. If your clone doesn't boot, don't upgrade, would be my motto.
I used SuperDuper, but will probably switch to CC since SD has yet to be Leopard compatible.

So I have a firewire drive enclosure that has been bootable since OSX 10.0. I have a Sawtooth G4 and it has been upgraded continuously since. I installed Leopard and now the firewire disk is no longer bootable. I put my old 10GB drive back in the system, installed on that and everything works from there. But it will no longer boot from that firewire drive. Anyone have any suggestions?

Keep trying. I had to try 11 times to get one drive to mount. That was last week.
Yesterday I had major boot problems and took 7 hours to get things back to normal.

Try resetting your pram: press option-command-P-R simultaneously during startup and keep holding down these keys until you hear the startup sound TWICE.
Also try shutting down your computer and unplugging it from the wall as well as unplugging all peripherals. Leave it that way for at least 15-30 minutes (this resets the Firewire bus in the computer).

Thanks for the info. I had tried the PRAM trick, but not leaving the machine unplugged. What a pain. I've never had any trouble with this drive before and since it's the biggest drive in my system I can't easily duplicate it on anything else without dropping $100 for another drive, nor can I put it in the system. Bummer.