Boot from Firewire External, OS 9.2, Lombard 400 with OrangeLink card?

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Level 2

220 points

Boot from Firewire External, OS 9.2, Lombard 400 with OrangeLink card?

I have a Lombard 400, running 9.2.1 with an OrangeLink Card. I have a Firewire external drive with a bootable 10.3.9 drive cloned to it. I have sucessfully booted from this drive to clone the drive to another powerbook I have, so I know it is bootable. The firewire drive shows up on the desktop of the Lombard and I can choose it as the startup disk in the control panel. However, when I restart the computer, it boots back into OS 9. What step am I missing here? I read documentation that the Firewire card is okay for booting.

G5180d, G4SDTiBook, G4TiBook, G4 Yosemite, PC 604, Mac OS 9.2.x

Posted on Dec 10, 2005 1:00 PM

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Answer 1

jpl

Level 7

28,285 points

Dec 10, 2005 2:52 PM in response to Amy Noorian

Amy,

Unfortunately you cannot boot through a FireWire PC card; it does not have the onboard firmware necessary to initialize at startup as does built-in FireWire. In addition, it does require supporting software and this does not load until the OS loads. The only bootable external drive would be a pure SCSI HD or an ATA/IDE HD in a case that uses a SCSI interface.

There is one possible alternative which I have never tried, but the application XPostFacto, used to install OSX on unsupported machines, can be used as a "helper" to boot an external FW drive through a PC card. How well this works I just don't know...

http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/

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Answer 2

Hardy Geer

Level 4

3,166 points

Dec 11, 2005 3:07 PM in response to jpl

A hard drive in a pc card case with an external piower supply can be booted from.

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Answer 3

jpl

Level 7

28,285 points

Dec 11, 2005 7:20 PM in response to Hardy Geer

Hardy,

This is true but MCE does not support OSX with their discontinued MCE PC Card HDs which I discovered to my great disappointment. The Lombard also does not start to any PC card device according to this article:

"PC Card devices and RAM disks are examples of devices that are not valid to start up from, even though the icon may be displayed in the Startup Disk control panel."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58354

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Answer 4

Hardy Geer

Level 4

3,166 points

Dec 11, 2005 8:27 PM in response to jpl

I did not expect a differance on this point between Wallstreet and Lombard. May it have to do with the fact that Liombard is New World?

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Answer 5

jpl

Level 7

28,285 points

Dec 11, 2005 8:53 PM in response to Hardy Geer

Hardy,

I believe you are correct but the New World ROM Lombard was kind of an oddball powerbook...no FireWire, could not boot a USB HD, did not support the Startup Manager, and probably some others I am missing. No doubt that the Pismo has it all over the Lombard.

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