Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with osx and firewire

4-bay Firewire/USB2 RAID enclosure for OS X?

xmutex — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:23:08 -0800

Looking for recommendations on a 4-bay Firewire/USB2 RAID enclosure that works well with OS X. I'd also like to see recs for a eSATA equivalent, though I'm definitely leaning towards Firewire/USB2. Thanks!

Installing Windows 7 on a MBP with a non-working DVD drive

N2O1138 — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:22:32 -0800

How can I install Windows 7 (via Boot Camp or rEFIt) from an ISO? I think the Superdrive on my Macbook Pro (10.5.6) is on its last legs, because it ejects almost anything I put in it. (Meaning blank DVDs, and the DVD I burned of the ISO on my Windows XP desktop with ImgBurn). It's not extremely old (I got it refurbished on Christmas 2007), but still old enough to be out of warranty (at least I would think so). What I have available: 1tb My Book Firewire External Hard Drive 4gb 1st gen iPod Nano, that isn't even formatted as an iPod right now, so it's basically just a 4gb USB flash drive. I know I can boot from it if it's set up right, because I've been using it with this What I've tried so far:
I can't restore the iPod to the ISO in Disk Utility, so I tried to convert the ISO to a DMG (in Disk Utility and using a program called Converso), getting errors both times.

I tried mounting the ISO, erasing everything on the iPod, and copying everything straight out of the ISO to the iPod, but it doesn't appear as anything bootable.

Please help if you can

How many hard drives does it take, before WinXP can see them?

jadepearl — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:42:29 -0800

External hard showing "weird". Better known as, sharing an external/portable hard drive between osx and winxp. I have tried out no less than 3 of these Lacie external hard drives.

They are formatted FAT32 and register perfect on my macs at home. However on 2 WinXP machines they register as a regular drive, are listed as "full" and nothing can be loaded or read from them. This all started because they initially could not be found on the winxp though device manager "saw" them just fine and disk managment found it "healthy". I got it enabled and allocated a drive. Now it does not show in disk management. This is what I have done so far:

1) Reformatted one on a mac for pc -- still not "mounted" though seen by device manager. Forced allocation using disk management. Unable to format on the PC to NTFS after it mounted. Unable to read or write because "full" or not recognized;

2) Plugged in a "virgin" FAT32 drive after forced allocation and it can be seen but now only registering as a drive with no further info and again, "full" cannot read nor write nor found by disk management;

3) MacDrive 7 unable to find or read the drives initially until I forced allocation and again, no read nor write nor formatting. App keeps asking where the mac drive is;

WinXP service pack 2 on my machine; hard drives connected via USB 2.0; Novell Zenworks and network drives are a part of my environment.

The drives are new and Lacie is generally a reputable firm. FAT32 should be able to be read by a WinXP machine. This is a consistent problem after trying 3 drives. Any advice would be nice.

Help me configure the ultimate Mac OSX backup solution.

drgonzo2k2 — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:04:57 -0800

Help me configure the ultimate Mac OSX backup solution! I just received two very nice external firewire hard drives for Christmas. My plan is to place my music collection on one drive and use the other drive to have a perfect copy of all my music in case the original fails. As I add to my collection every couple of days or so, I'd really like to automate this to create regular backups. My plan was to have both drives connected and powered on, with the backup drive unmounted. The OS would mount it when needed to do the backup and then unmount it again when it was finished. I thought I could accomplish this with SuperDuper! and its scheduling function, and for the most part it works. The only problem is when my wife logs in the system mounts the backup drive. Then spotlight wants to index it, and if I log in it seems to get stuck in this weird phase of mounting and unmounting.

If anyone could tell me step-by-step how to make this work and have the drive ONLY be mounted when it is needed to perform a backup, I would greatly appreciate it. If I can get this to work I'd like to do the same thing with my system drive and a 3rd firewire drive that I have.

Lookin' for a new external that will satisfy

dino terror — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:22:35 -0800

Leopard / Time Machine / External Drive Filter: Looking for a new 2.5" external. How big should it be if my internal is 120 gigs? Firewire or USB? My initial thinking is that USB is more common, I can plug it into PC's if I care to make an NTFS partition, and I've seen drives that allow you to daisy chain other USB things through the drive. But being relatively new to Macs, are there things Macs can do with Firewire(400?) that they can't do with USB?

Four hard drives. One problem.

ImJustRick — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:40:52 -0800

What can I do with 4 big IDE drives? I have four biggish IDE drives (is that what they're called?).

I had planned to buy a Firewire 4-bay enclosure and make a RAID out of them, but 4-bay enclosures are spendy and noisy.

I keep seeing deals on 1-bay enclosures ($22 on DealMac! Yeah!); if I pick up four of thoise is there some way I can turn them all into one big drive? Specifically what I want to do is store all my movies and MP3s on one huge server that I can access throughout my house.

Or is there some other way I can use them?

Macbook as an external hard drive

JPowers — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:44:52 -0800

How can I use my Macbook as an external hard drive? If I want to connect my Macbook to another computer (via firewire or USB, not via a network connection), I've heard that I can connect the two computers, boot up the Macbook, press a few buttons, and then my Macbook will show up on the other computer as an external drive. Is this true? If so, how?

Also, is it possible to do this using my Macbook and a Windows machine?

or maybe that one with the fox, goose, and grain.

bartleby — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 11:36:17 -0800

Please help me with a Hard Drive "Tower of Hanoi" puzzle. I have to move some stuff around on drives & partitions, and I may be confusing myself & making it seem more complicated.
Somebody set me straight or give me a best practice, please. Super-smarties can skip the details and go straight to the ">>>" part below, answer it in one step, and show off. :P

I have a LaCie 160 GB external HD split into two equal-sized ~80GB partitions.
There is a bootable OSX 10.3 clone (used CarbonCopyCloner) of an old system taking up one half (pre-Tiger-transition backup, allows me to rarely run some old OS9 stuff). The other half is overflow file storage - photo albums, document scans,torrented video files, etc. that take up only about a quarter of the space.

I have it connected to an 80GB OSX 10.4 PPC Mini (via the Mini's single FireWire 400 jack) that's my current un-backed-up system.
I would like to repartition the 160 GB external drive as a single partition, bootable clone of my Mini to back up to, incorporating the overflow files as well, with some free space left for more. I love the idea, and have used it to save myself before when HDs have gone bad, of backing up to a bootable clone. HD goes bad? Switch your startup disk to the clone and you're back up with no other transition worries. Problem is, I can't transfer that clone file by file from one HD to another - it has to go as one big piece, no?

But I'd also like to keep a copy of the 10.3 clone around as well, because.... that's the kind of person I am. I'll just buy, say, a SmartDisk 80 GB FW400 external drive and keep it in a drawer unless/until I need it. I don't need to buy a FireWire hub just for this project (or do I?), or to keep the several external drives connected at all times.

Question is, how do I copy the 10.3 Panther clone from one external drive to another - especially since my Mini only has one FireWire 400 port?

Let's say that I can just back up the overflow files on the LaCie to DVD until the larger moves are done and get one 80GB blank partition on the Lacie HD.

>>>Which gives me a starting position of:

1)LaCie
80GB Panther clone
80GB Free (blank)

2)Mini
80GB Tiger system

3)SmartDisk
80GB Free (blank)

HELP ME PLEASE get to my desired end point of:

1)LaCie
160GB Tiger Clone (+overflow files+free space for more)

2)Mini
80 GB Tiger System

3)SmartDisk
80 GB Panther clone<<<

The Lacie is a triple-interface model, so could I connect the Lacie to the Mini via USB, and then connect the SmartDisk to the Lacie via FireWire, and then instruct it (how?) to move the Panther clone from one drive to another?

Or am I going to have to move my Tiger OS from the Mini to the open partition on the LaCie, then move the Panther clone to the Mini, in order to move it again to the SmartDisk? Then clear the Panther off the Mini, put Tiger back on, repartition the LaCie, and proceed from there?

I'm sure I'm missing an/the easy step here.
Please hope me.

It just works, right?

mds35 — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 19:30:48 -0800

Data recovery in target disk mode: what are the pitfalls? A friend of mine has a G4 iBook that is dead. He has been told by a computer repair person (non-Apple) that his logic board is hosed. He'd like to save his old iTunes and iPhoto libraries to his new MacBook Pro. I told him about Target Disk Mode and offered to perform the transfer for him, but he's wary and is afraid of losing some of his photos forever. Is target disk mode fairly safe, assuming there is no damage to the HD on his old iBook? Also, is target mode even possible if the logic board is hosed? What if the power supply on the iBook is dead? Is there any thing I should beware of?

installing os x via firewire?

cmyr — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 10:21:12 -0800

I have a gray g4 running os 9, a g4 ibook running tiger, a firewire cable, a DVD copy of the tiger installation, and a burning desire to get tiger onto the (DVD drive-lacking) desktop. What are my options? I'm not great with this sort of thing, but i'm more or less competent. Is there any way I can either boot the desktop into disc-mode and install tiger onto it, or maybe mount the DVDs on the ibook and install from them via the desktop? The desktop only has a CD drive.

if none of my ideas are any good, what are my options for getting tiger onto the desktop?

Firewire to SCSI

aladfar — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 09:49:42 -0800

An excellent SCSI negative scanner seeks connection with firewire based Mac running OS X. What's a peripheral to do? I've a feeling this may have been asked before, but a search through the archives didn't reveal anything. I've found a few adapters via Google, but they look to be a bit clunky. If someone has had a good experience with a solid piece of hardware, I'd appreciate hearing about it!

Our data is safer because of your efforts

Popular Ethics — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 17:40:43 -0800

Best way to backup two OS X laptops to a single firewire drive? My wife and I each own iBooks, and we've recently purchased a firewire external hard drive with enough capacity to hold the entirety of both of our hard drives. I'm wondering what's the easiest way to back up our laptops regularly?

I have downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner, a trial version of SuperDuper, and Lacie's Silver Keeper, but all of them seem to want to make the external drive a clone of my hard drive, which would prevent my wife from using it too. I haven't tried Personal Backup, or Retrospect, both of which look promising, but expensive.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Perhaps I should just copy the /applications and /users folder to the hard drive manually once in a while?

Bonus points if you can propose a solution which only does versioning like my SVN server at work, so that I can roll my machine back to a specific date.

Double Super Bonus points if you can propose a solution which keeps my wife's and my archive protected with separate passwords (not that either of us have anything to hide from eachother, but we may share this drive with others).

Connecting Tiger to 0S 9.2 via firewire?

quadog — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 00:30:11 -0800

Is there a way to connect an iMac running Tiger with a G4 running OS 9.2 via firewire so I can transfer files from my old system to the new one? Holding down the "T" key on the G4 during startup doesn't seem to be doing the trick. My Google research has failed but I'm guessing this is easy (for the Mac inclined).

DV Deck FireWire Problem

jtron — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 23:25:28 -0800

My Mac won't recognize my DV deck... This has been thus for the last week or so. It may have been coincidental with my installation of 10.3.9.

I've tried resetting FireWire by unplugging the computer for 5 minutes, I've reset the nvRAM and PRAM, I've trashed the Preferences, and I've reinstalled 10.3.9 from the combo update. Still nothing, although the computer recognizes my iPod and my camcorder.

I have a Quicksilver 733 MHz G4, and the deck is a JVC SR-VS30U. My 3-year AppleCare Protection Plan ran out a month ago; without being able to interface with this deck the utility of this system drops precipitously, and I can ill afford repairs, a new computer, or a new deck.

I'm hoping that wiping the hard drive and installing Tiger will solve the problem, but I have plenty of work that needs to be done before Tiger arrives.

UPS and OSX?

xmutex — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 09:20:29 -0800

I have an external firewire drive with like totally important stuff. I've heard that sudden power loss to such a drive could mean catastrophic data loss and global warming and dead children. I therefore have my drive hooked into an older model APC UPS box (maybe this kind). I run OSX on a PowerBook. What are my options w/r/t/ the UPS notifying the PowerBook of power loss and the PowerBook shutting down the drive automatically?

Images quit refreshing using iSight / iBook / EvoCam.

terrapin — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 09:52:46 -0800

An iSight / iBook / EvoCam question concerning non-refreshing images and possibly firewire power inside ... I run a silly little webcam from my home that is set up as such: iSight connected via Firewire to a G4 iBook using EvoCam v3.4 to serve up the images. EvoCam is set up to take a picture every 20 seconds and FTP it to my remote web server. This works for a few hours, but at some point the camera stops sending new pictures, and EvoCam simply adds a new date stamp to the image it had last and continues to upload it.

I have the iBook set up to power off the screen after a while to avoid burning in a ghost image on the iBook's screen. I have turned off all other power management. Since the screen turns off after a minute without apparently affecting the uploading of images, I don't think this is the issue. The images upload correctly for up to 4 hours or so before I notice the issue creeping up.

EvoCam claims this issue is with Apple and that Apple is aware of it. While waiting for Apple to fix this, EvoCam suggests using v3.4 of their software which has a work-around that apparently refreshes the image periodically to avoid the freeze up. But this doesn't seem to be working, for me, at least.

I think my issue may be an issue with the Firewire port and/or iSight. I think it may be that at some point, the iBook stops powering the port or something.

Anyway, I am relatively new to Apple (switched in 2003) and all of the stuff above is simply thinking out-loud. I have checked a variety of sources I have found via Google, and have perused (and posted) to EvoCam's support forums. All with no luck. I'd like to get this thing working in time to humour the family with a Tree Cam this holiday season. If anyone can help I'd appreciate it.

Can I force this Lacie firewire drive to format as FAT32?

skylar — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:10:20 -0800

I've just bought a Lacie 160 gigabyte firewire drive. It's to be plugged into a Windows XP machine, but also to be written to and read by a Mac OSX machine. I want to format it with the FAT32 file system, but Windows won't let me. Is there a way to force the drive to format as FAT32? [More inside...] I've done this twice before, with two identical Lacie drives which are both FAT32. Hence I know that this file system works for me and want to make the third drive use the same system. Unfortunately, this time the New Partition Wizard will only let me make an NTFS partition - presumably because FAT32 doesn't support partitions over 32 gigabytes.

Is there a piece of software which will force Windows XP to format the drive as FAT32? It could be a Windows XP or Mac OSX application - but I'm not so keen on using command line interfaces. Oh... and I don't have a floppy drive of any sort. All ideas gratefully received... thanks.

Can anyone recommend a TV tuner for a Mac?

rorycberger — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 18:18:21 -0800

Can anyone recommend a TV tuner for a Mac? I have an iBook, so it has to be either a firewire or USB model (not a PC card), and i'm hoping to spend under a hundred bucks. I have no real interest in any TVR functions, as my hard drive is maxed out already and I have a TiVo at home. I'm at Dartmouth for a month - which is in the middle of nowhere - so it must be available online to be shipped immediately, preferably with expedited shipping.

Networking Windows and Mac OSX 10.3

benjh — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 18:01:25 -0800

What is the best way to network my Windows and Mac OSX 10.3 machines? [more inside]

I have a home network set up, but I can't seem to share my whole hard drive with my Windows machine, only public directories. On the flip side, if I set a folder for sharing on Windows, the Mac doesn't automatically detect it, I have to set it to connect to that folder.

Ideally I'd like to be able to access either machine's hard drive no matter which machine I have connected. I'm thinking Firewire networking might be a good solution for this (and faster than my 10/100 switch) but can't seem to find any decent instructions. If I try networking via Firewire, can I restrict so I am only sharing with machines on my network, since Windows file sharing frightens and disturbs me. Well I meant to put it inside. Ah well. Sorry about that.