Can I run everything from an external hard drive?

I have done everything you said and it is works fine... sometimes. I had the external drive connected to the mac mini by USB, to allow me to use my only firewire cable to transfer the files over from my old eMac. However when I had finished copying, I connected the external drive to the mac mini and booted with fire wire. When using firewire I get frequent crashes, even doing simple tasks like running software update and operating itunes. Now I'm back on USB and it's fine, but a bit slow. I heard it was better and faster to use firewire.
Is there anything i can do?

Thanks
 
How 'bout you install OS X on the internal drive, and put music and whatnot onto the external drive? If it's really causing this much trouble, just work around it. There's no need fighting a losing battle.

I personally have installed Tiger on my eMac's internal drive, have about half the applications I run in my "main" applications folder, and half on my firewire drive. I also use my firewire drive for my music and video library. I've run this setup on four different Macs and haven't had a problem yet. I did, however, have some qualms using a firewire drive as the boot device. Speed alone made me change from running an operating system on an external drive to an internal drive. Paging is just too slow through a south gate, eh?
 
ok yeah that sounds like a good idea. is there any way i can boot from the internal drive, but have the home folder on the external drive, for the music and photos etc.?

thanks
 
Um, I don't think so. You could probably create a link between the drives/folders somehow. What I do is set my folders of pictures in my dock and they act just like an internal drive if I click on them. I'm not sure about how iPhoto works with the library, but somebody's probably found a way to store the library on an external drive.

As far as music goes, somebody mentioned earlier that you can just point iTunes toward the music folder of your choice. Or, more simply, just drag your music folders onto the iTunes icon in the dock after selecting the option not to copy added songs to the library.
 
Qion said:
How 'bout you install OS X on the internal drive, and put music and whatnot onto the external drive? If it's really causing this much trouble, just work around it. There's no need fighting a losing battle.

I personally have installed Tiger on my eMac's internal drive, have about half the applications I run in my "main" applications folder, and half on my firewire drive. I also use my firewire drive for my music and video library. I've run this setup on four different Macs and haven't had a problem yet. I did, however, have some qualms using a firewire drive as the boot device. Speed alone made me change from running an operating system on an external drive to an internal drive. Paging is just too slow through a south gate, eh?
Click to expand...

Completely agree. I do this myself. My iBook has a 100GB drive, but that's not enough for all mu music, so the iTunes library is on the external drive. Also, I used to keep the iPhoto library, and most of my documents on my external drive, before I upgraded the drive in the iBook.

This seems like a losing battle, and he'll get better performance doing it your way anyway.
 
hugh1988 said:
ok yeah that sounds like a good idea. is there any way i can boot from the internal drive, but have the home folder on the external drive, for the music and photos etc.?

thanks
Click to expand...

Two tips will help you. You don't want to keep your home folder on the external. Do this instead for itunes.
http://www.mymacblog.com/index.php/archive/tip-move-the-itunes-library/

And this for iPhoto.
http://www.mymacblog.com/index.php/archive/tip-moving-the-iphoto-library/

Hope that helps.
 
thanks guys thats really helpful, i think i'll be moving my iphoto and itunes libary with help from those links. will let you know how i get on!
 
This is a very interesting thread. I just got a WD My Book Home Edition and I was thinking about moving everything but the System folder to the external drive (connected via Firewire), so Tiger (10.4.11) could run free in the now spacious internal hard drive (only 40Gb). But I see it's a good idea to keep the entire Home folder in the boot drive (internal).
 
You can install OS X and have it bootable on an external FW drive quite simply.
If the system is an Intel mac....
Just make sure to partition it properly, and more importantly make sure to have it set to use "Guid" partition map.
I believe the Guid thingy was the biggest problem in this old thread.
After doing the above you can have your total system on the external, and if you were using Leopard like myself, you can use the internal drive for TM backups.

jb.
 
My system still is Power PC.

I've seen that many users go for the bootable external FW drive, I'm still undecided about doing it or not. Something else that is giving me troubles is sharing the new FW drive with a Dell laptop. I can connect both computers via wireless fairly easy, but for the life of me I can't share the drive. I've looked in Sharing and Network and even in the drive's info file to see if I need to check anything with no luck. It is worth nothing I have not done anything to the drive yet, I plugged it in right out the box (and haven't installed anything either that came with it, either)
 
If you use file sharing with an admin account, you will have remote access to all mounted volumes. If that's not what you want, and you would like to ONLY share certain volumes/folders, you'll need to use a third-party tool such as SharePoints, or upgrade to Leopard, which has this feature built-in.

I'm in pretty much the same situation as you. I have an internal 40GB drive and a big FireWire drive. I've decided to put my system and all the files that normally go with it — applications, Home folder, etc. — on my internal drive, and put all my large files like movies and music on my external. I have 17GB free on my internal drive now, so it's no problem at all.

Now, if you use some really massive applications like GarageBand or iDVD, you might want to use a different setup and just boot from the FireWire drive. A lot of those applications' girth lies in the Library folder, so separating it from your boot volume would be problematic (although probably not impossible).
 
Mikuro said:
If you use file sharing with an admin account, you will have remote access to all mounted volumes. If that's not what you want, and you would like to ONLY share certain volumes/folders, you'll need to use a third-party tool such as SharePoints, or upgrade to Leopard, which has this feature built-in.
Click to expand...

Accessing from the Laptop, I can go anywhere on the Mac pretty much. Except to the mounted volumes (iPod, FW drive, etc). This is why I'm puzzled.

UPDATE: Sharepoints works like a charm. Now I have a shortcut on the Laptop's desktop to access directly to the FW drive.


I'm in pretty much the same situation as you. I have an internal 40GB drive and a big FireWire drive. I've decided to put my system and all the files that normally go with it — applications, Home folder, etc. — on my internal drive, and put all my large files like movies and music on my external. I have 17GB free on my internal drive now, so it's no problem at all.

Now, if you use some really massive applications like GarageBand or iDVD, you might want to use a different setup and just boot from the FireWire drive. A lot of those applications' girth lies in the Library folder, so separating it from your boot volume would be problematic (although probably not impossible).
Click to expand...

I mainly run Adobe CS3, iTunes, iPhoto and every now and then iMovie. I guess I will moving all my created files associated with those programs (music, pics, movies, CS3 files) to the FW drive.

Right now I'm debating whether to reformat the FW drive to HSF+ or to leave it as FAT 32. The Dell laptop seems to get along with my Mac's internal drive (HSF+) quite well.
 
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If you can use HFS+, you definitely should. FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit, doesn't support journaling (making it more susceptible to errors from crashes/power failures), and suffers from fragmentation much more than HFS+. The only time you should use FAT32 is when it is required for cross-platform compatibility. If the PC reads HFS+ to begin with, you're golden.
 
Mikuro said:
If you can use HFS+, you definitely should. FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit, doesn't support journaling (making it more susceptible to errors from crashes/power failures), and suffers from fragmentation much more than HFS+. The only time you should use FAT32 is when it is required for cross-platform compatibility. If the PC reads HFS+ to begin with, you're golden.
Click to expand...

Yep.

I reformatted the FW drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and installed MacDrive on the PC Laptop. Everything is working great so far and my internal has now over 22Gb for the System and Applications to use.

Thanks for the input!
 
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