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
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Now we're talkin' !
I'll try this in a month or two with my Buslink Firewire drive. -- Adrian
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