G4 issue - booting Leopard from external drive

T

Theordore

Registered
If this has been resolved in another thread, my apologies and please show me where. I have searched.
Environment clones ( made by Leopard compatible SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner) to two separate LaCie Firewire drives will not boot from those drives Leopard (10.5.6) running on an old 14" iBook G4 1.1 GHZ. Both SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner declared the clones bootable, and they are selectable as Startup drives. All three drives (internal included) are partitioned using Apple Partition Map and OSX Extended Journaled. Has anyone met and solved this problem?
Thanks in advance.
BTW - I did read somewhere that Leopard is designed to use the GUID partition scheme; but this is of no use with a PPC Mac. Could this be the source of the problem?
 
Leopard is indifferent as to whether your drives have a GUID or APM partition scheme -- it doesn't affect anything.

Were the systems cloned from the 14" iBook, or were they cloned from another machine and you're trying to boot the 14" iBook with those clones?

Be aware that a cloned Mac OS X installation from an Intel-based Macintosh computer may not be able to boot a PowerPC-based Macintosh computer, and has nothing to do with the partition scheme of the drive.
 
Thanks for a prompt response. The systems were cloned from the same PPC computer where the problem is happening. I saw the beginning of a thread on MacFixit which suggests the LaCie drives are the source of the problem. (I could not read the whole thread -- MacFixit (CNET) wants $24 (okay) for the privelege of scanning my computer to see what software I am running (NOT okay).
 
Theordore said:
...two separate LaCie Firewire drives will not boot from those drives Leopard (10.5.6) running on an old 14" iBook G4 1.1 GHZ.
Click to expand...

In the Bombich Forums is an excellent step by step post on how to properly prepare your external HD so that it will be bootable:
http://forums.bombich.com/viewtopic.php?t=4084
You may want to give this post a look just to be sure you have done everything necessary.

There is a lot of information about LaCie hard drives here:
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/harddrives/topic2190.html
but the complaints are mainly about failed power supplies and bad cases.

I've heard of users having problems booting from LaCie hard drives before, but I have not heard of a reliable cure. If your LaCie's won't boot after carefully following the steps outlined on the Bombich site, you might be best served by contacting LaCie support and seeing what they have to say. If you do this, please let us know what they told you.
 
Thanks for **great** help, Randy. Your advice is consistent with a related thread in the MacWorld forum, to the effect that mysterious inconsistent success/failure is happening with the LaCie drives used for external-drive booting, and the most one can do is take the preliminary care your suggest. It seems that if there is failure after that care, I had better move on to another drive (Maxtor seems recommended to work consistently with SuperDuper), since a LaCie spokesperson is quoted as saying they did not design the Little Disk to support external booting operations.
Interestingly, one of my two LaCie drives is working flawlessly as an external boot drive with both Panther and Jaguar (on another computer). So there seems to be an issue arising from an interaction between Leopard, the specific formatting/partitioning scheme(s), and the LaCie firmware.
Anyway, I will follow your advice, make one last effort and get ready abandon LaCie if that fails.
 
Theordore said:
... a LaCie spokesperson is quoted as saying they did not design the Little Disk to support external booting operations.
Click to expand...

If it is convenient for you to get it for me, and you saw a link given to that quote, I'd love to have it. This comes up fairly often, and many users won't believe something unless you have a citation.

Theordore said:
So there seems to be an issue arising from an interaction between Leopard, the specific formatting/partitioning scheme(s), and the LaCie firmware.
Anyway, I will follow your advice, make one last effort and get ready abandon LaCie if that fails.
Click to expand...

I've heard about there being a firmware update from LaCie. So it might be worthwhile to either check their Web site or to call them and ask about it.

Please let us know how things go.
 
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