On Oct 1, 2008, at 12:45 AM, Mullin9 wrote: > I have a Beige Powermac G3, > Is there a way to add the FireWire 400 card in the PCI slot, > and boot off an external Hard drive.
Yes. You can add any FW400 card and boot OS X from external FW drives using XPostFacto 4.0. The best Firewire cards use the Texas Instruments chipset. Others may also work, I'm not aware of any that are unbootable. On the other end, the enclosure end, Oxford chipsets are by far the best, and some need to be avoided, specifically the GeneSys Logic GL711/811 and the early Prolific Logic PL3507. These are flakey and can't boot. Most of the enclosures sold by HD manufacturers are bootable and OK. To boot you'll need to install OS X onto the HD and then use XPostFacto to enable FW booting by using the "Helper Disk" option. This is done by starting the boot process on an internal HD (called the 'helper') and then transferring the boot over to the external HD after the Firewire port has initialized. This is done by synchronizing the boot software on both drives, the boot software on the helper is stored in special invisible files, so you can have another System on the drive or partition without messing it up. You should be able to boot any version of OS X, but Panther and Tiger run better than Jaguar. To effectively run Panther or Tiger you'll need to invest in an ATI Radeon video card because of a video bug that effects the onboard Rage video. You can also enable Quartz Extreme with a Radeon card using PCI Extreme 3.1, which will really speed up some graphics operations, I've noticed that scrolling large files such as large iTunes libraries is dramatically faster with Quartz Extreme enabled. You won't have any 1st 8 GB limit on external FW HDs, you can boot a 500 GB or 1 TB if you want. The 1st 8 GB partition IS important still, the "helper" MUST be within that 1st 8 GB. If you have an internal HD larger than 128 GB (the max recognized by a Beige), you can enable the entire drive to be recognized and be useable in two ways. The easiest is to format the HD with Intech HD Speedtools 3.5 for OS 9 which makes the whole HD useable in OS 9.x. Then you can use the Intech Hi- Capacity Extension for OS X to enable OS X to see the whole HD. There is one problem with this, which is IF you ever boot a CD/DVD or other HD System that LACKS the Intech Hi-Cap. extension you can destroy the data on the whole HD. The solution is to partition the HD at EXACTLY the 128 GB point (131,072 MB) so that if you boot a "normal" system it will only have access to that "perfect" 1st 128 GB partition and the rest will remain untouched and invisible. The 2nd way to enable larger HD is by a tweak to the Open Firmware that enables larger HDs to be recognized. This is free, but again, for safety you'd need to partition at the exact 128 GB point just in case the Open Firmware tweak was erased and set to the default state again. You can search the G3-5 List archives for "LBA48" and read about this, or see this page: <http://nanchatte.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/128gb-large-hdd-lba48-support-on-the-g4-cube-with-leopard/ > I like booting from Firewire, it's much simpler than messing around with this internal large HD support. You could even use a small OEM HD inside the Beige with OS 9 installed, and have OS X only on the large external FW HD. Should work perfect. If you need help, I can help off- list. > Did any Beige G3, ever came with a Firewire 400 built in. No. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
