Reformanting a Hard Drive
I have an external La Cie drive that refuses to work as a boot drive, I've both cloned my PowerBook's drive and installed Panther directly, but the drive still refuses to boot. What tools should I use to reformat the drive and give it a fresh start? Or are there other methods I should attempt first? Thanks.
Comments
Personally, I think booting to external drives is often hit or miss, but that is only because I have had so little experience doing it. The stranger the setup, the less likely it will work, imo. If the HD + adapter requires special drivers in the OS before the Mac can "see" the drive, it certainly can't see it before the OS is even loaded. If the hardware is "native" enough to the Mac in whatever manner you are using to connect it, then you have a chance of it seeing a bootable system folder right off. At least that is my understanding of the matter.
Originally posted by Junkyard Dawg
La Cie products are bad news, that's all I know. I bought an expensive La Cie FW CD burner a few years back, and the thing couldn't burn an audio CD without randomly inserting gibberish between ~5% of the tracks. I called La Cie support and explained the problem, and the phone droid told me that the Firewire bus was the problem. He said, "you wouldn't have this problem if you hadn't bought a Firewire drive." Of course what he really meant was, I wouldn't have had the problem if I hadn't bought a Mac. La Cie refused to fix the problem, so I had to dump the drive on eBay and bought a Sony instead.
As the owner of a LaCie HD and CD/DVD±RW I am very pleased with their products and their Mac support. I have started up from my external drive and it has worked beautifully. BUT don't save your backup as an image because obviously that will not start up. Use carbon copy cloner or install from CD, then open system preferences and choose the LaCie hard disk.