At 06:07 -0600 01/02/2003, Gary Gorbet wrote: >Ryan's strategy, apparently, is to allow the >designation in XPF of a "helper disk" whereby the boot begins on one >volume, then - once enough (like drivers) has been pulled in - to >switch to the other (firewire) drive. I don't have a good sense of >how feasible such as scheme might be, but - as you say, Jeff - Ryan >is a clever guy. So, I guess I won't _count_ on being able to boot >from the FW on S900 and will just wait and see what the next months >bring from XPF.
I was wondering if Ryan might be thinking of such a hybrid booting system. Some of the comments I've read about the topic and how the firewire drivers were discussed made me suspect that might be the case. But that isn't *exactly* booting from firewire. You would still need to have a bootable drive of some other type present in order to use the Firewire drive as a boot drive, and the other bootable drive might need to be pre-configured for the special firewire support. Having the hybrid system would have some advantages, but it doesn't give you the full advantage of firewire booting. To my mind, one of the big advantages of bootability from an interface is that when my other interfaces fail, I can still boot from the remaining ones. That would not be the case with such a hybrid system. For example, on my S900 in ATX case, I keep a SCSI RAID and an IDE interface. I have a 40 GB IDE drive on the IDE card. I have the drives divided into many volumes, but there's always at least one volume on each system which is a fully configured boot volume (this is OS9.1, not X, BTW). So if I lose my SCSI system, which I did two days ago, I can still boot from the IDE system and use that to recover the SCSI system and vice versa. It saves a lot of time because I find in a single drive system one of the biggest time consumers is just getting back to where you can boot the computer back up to look at teh drives and access your disk utilities. Anyway, a hybrid firewire boot system would not have the above advantage nor the related advantages. Still, it would have its uses. 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! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.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/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
