With the upcoming release of OSX, I decided to make some changes to my PB configuration... I bought a 20 Gig FW hard drive and then decided to replace the internal 12 Gig HD of my PB with the drive present in the FW case (and put the 12 Gig in the FW case).
I find it more convenient to have a bigger internal HD... Anyway, the swap process went very well until we tried to boot from the (now) internal 20 Gig HD. The PB did not recognize the drive at all. I then booted from the OS 9 CD and neither Drive Setup and HD Speed Tool were able to see and reformat the drive. When then tried to use the 12 gig HD (now in the FW case) and it did not mount either...
Not looking good! I backed up the content of the drives (the 20 Gig drive had some additional stuff that I could afford to lose) to each other and now, none are useable!!!
Fortunately, the local retailer had an newly instaled OSX in a FW iMac. We tried the FW drive and it showed up on the desktop. Great! We then used the OSX Disk Utility and were able to reformat the drive (this step was necessary to remove all linux partitions that were taking too much space to allow proper backup of the stuff on the 20 gig HD).
Once done, we installed a basic OS9 system on it and swapped the drives back. The PB was able to boot from the "OS X firewire-formatted" drive (remember that we could not boot from the other drive which was "firewire-formatted" with god-knows-what. Whe then plugged the 20 Gig FW drive and it mounted all right (this was not surprising since it did before). We backed up everything and plugged the FW 20 gig drive in the OSX iMac to format it.
We swaped the drives once again and now, the 20 Gig HD mounted all right.
Bottom line
- OSX can format FW drives easily (at least the Toshiba we had)
- FW drives formatted with X can be swapped easily (at least from FW to ATA - in OS 9.1)
- Things that looks fairly simple can become surprisignly complex!
OS X rocks... I cannot wait to get my copy!
I find it more convenient to have a bigger internal HD... Anyway, the swap process went very well until we tried to boot from the (now) internal 20 Gig HD. The PB did not recognize the drive at all. I then booted from the OS 9 CD and neither Drive Setup and HD Speed Tool were able to see and reformat the drive. When then tried to use the 12 gig HD (now in the FW case) and it did not mount either...
Not looking good! I backed up the content of the drives (the 20 Gig drive had some additional stuff that I could afford to lose) to each other and now, none are useable!!!
Fortunately, the local retailer had an newly instaled OSX in a FW iMac. We tried the FW drive and it showed up on the desktop. Great! We then used the OSX Disk Utility and were able to reformat the drive (this step was necessary to remove all linux partitions that were taking too much space to allow proper backup of the stuff on the 20 gig HD).
Once done, we installed a basic OS9 system on it and swapped the drives back. The PB was able to boot from the "OS X firewire-formatted" drive (remember that we could not boot from the other drive which was "firewire-formatted" with god-knows-what. Whe then plugged the 20 Gig FW drive and it mounted all right (this was not surprising since it did before). We backed up everything and plugged the FW 20 gig drive in the OSX iMac to format it.
We swaped the drives once again and now, the 20 Gig HD mounted all right.
Bottom line
- OSX can format FW drives easily (at least the Toshiba we had)
- FW drives formatted with X can be swapped easily (at least from FW to ATA - in OS 9.1)
- Things that looks fairly simple can become surprisignly complex!
OS X rocks... I cannot wait to get my copy!
