At 17:24 -0500 04/02/2002, Nancy Haitz wrote: >We have a combo USB/Firewire card in our c600 and it works fine with an >external Firewire Hard Drive for reading and writing purposes. The FW >drive will not boot the c600, or our 9600. As far as I can tell, an >external Firewire drive will not boot any machine with a PCI Firewire >Card. I assume it will only boot a machine that was built with FW >included.
Correct. Devices connected to Firewire cards are not bootable. There are no drivers for Firewire cards on the card itself. The driver must load with the OS. Since you can't load the OS until the drive is being accessed adn you can't access any of your firewire drives until the OS is being loaded, there's just no way to boot from a device connected to a firewire drive. SCSI and IDE cards (except the Adaptec 2906) have a driver stored on the card. This driver-on-the-card is called firmware. Part of the PCI specification is to check the cards for firmware at boot up, and if it is present it is loaded. So SCSI and IDE cards are bootable because their drivers are stored on a chip on the card itself. It should be possible to build a firewire card with on-board drivers, but no-one is doing it. Apple machines with built in firewire can boot from firewire devices because Apple has boot a driver for firewire in the firmware (analogous to ROM) on those machines. Jeff Walther -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | SPECIAL SM LIST PRICES - 24x Bootable SCSI CDROM $39.99, Umax Processors $19.99 PowerSupplies from C500/C600 $49.99 J700/S900 $79.99 <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> 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/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
