External Drive to Boot OSX G4 or Intel Mac?

April 15, 2006 8:45 AM

Are there any external drives that OSX can boot from in both a PowerBook G4 AND the newer Intel Macs?

I have a PowerBook G4 (OSX 10.3.9) and I want to buy an external drive that can boot both my G4 and one of the newer Intel Macs, which I will probably be buying soon. Are any available? None of the people who sell the drives seem to know for sure. I have been looking at the NewerTech MiniStack v2, the Mercury Elite AL Pro, and the Iomega Black Series. Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks.

posted by philmas to technology (3 comments total)

It's not the hardware that's the issue, it's how the drive is formatted. Apparently it's possible, but it sure looks complicated...
posted by toddshot at 8:59 AM on April 15, 2006

It isn't that complicated. Well, maybe it is complicated—but only a little.

toddshot has the link that popped into my mind when I read your lead-in to this question on AskMefi.

Because one of the machines will be PPC, the drive you use will have to use, or have, firewire. I simply bought a generic-brand USB 2.0 + Firewire 400 "shell" and added my own drive. It's bus-powered, so I won't need an AC adapter for it. After cramming in the BYOHD* part of this equation, I made two partitions on the Intel machine, using Disk Utility (the app, in /Applications/Utilities/, that Apple distributes with OS X) to format one to be non-journaled HFS Plus and the other to be whatever the EFI-friendly partition scheme Apple chose is (maybe it's just FAT-32 with a fancy alternative to the MBR that's been... right. Tangent.). Then, I dumped the Mac OS X Tiger DVD as a disk image (again, viz Disk Utility) onto the partition that would handle PPC-architecture Macs and some of the System Recovery DVDs (there are two DVDs for iMacs and for MacBook Pro's; I assume the Mini's are the same) onto the Intel partition.

With the drive you're using selected in Disk Utility's sidebar thingy, click on the right-most tab on DU's main window. You're supposed to use it to restore a 1:1 "snapshot" of your pre-Oops-Oh-Shit system configuration, personal documents, application settings and preferences, etc.

Just select the relevant DVD as the source for each of your two boot partitions.

Lastly, there's a menu option in Disk Utility called Scan Image for Restore in the Images menu. I did the same thing on a PPC Mac just for good measure, but I wouldn't bet money that that step was necessary.

And, come to think of it, I wonder if, since you're just "restoring" those DVDs onto a couple of partitions, you need to fuss with anything more than making the two partitions and making Disk Utility "restore."



*(hard drive)
posted by Yeomans at 9:06 PM on April 15, 2006

Oh this sounds way complicated for me. Not being that advanced with technology matters. I hope that someone comes up with an external drive that is equiped with the proper software so that I can simply plug it in and go. In the meantime I'll study your directions a bit more Yeomans and see what I can do. I'm running out of disk space fast. Thanks.
posted by philmas at 8:58 AM on April 17, 2006