On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 2:30 PM, PCI PowerMacs <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Booting from a Firewire drive would require some sort of firewire extension file in a nonvolatile RAM ( NVRAM0 which is possible But I have not read of such a thing for Firewire.
An analogy to this might be expecting an egg to hatch before it has been fertilized. How can the Fire wire drive boot if the Firewire extension is not active ? How can the Firewire extension be active if the OS is not already booted ? [end quote] Open Firmware on a PCI Mac by default points to the Mac ROM as the boot source. With booting controled by the ROM it is not possible to boot from a fire wire drive. Open Firmware provides other options for booting however, when OS X is installed on an Old World Mac, Open firmware is changed to point to a boot loader on the HD as the boot source. The boot loader can contain just about any code a person would wish to include. XPostFacto adds drivers needed for PCI Macs to run OS X in the boot loader, and one of the items added is the ability to boot from firewire. While XPostFacto is made for running OS X on unsupported machines, it can be used with OS 9 alone to provide the ability to boot from firewire. So while it is not possible to boot from firewire without having a hard drive present, it is possible to boot from a firewire drive after the boot loader has completed its mission. The hard drive will spin up and after a couple seconds the OS will load from the firewire drive. bill -- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PCI-PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/pci-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/pci-powermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
