TidBITS#672/24-Mar-03
=====================
Ever try to do something nice and have it come back to bite you?
To the tune of $15,000? That's what happened to author Glenn
Fleishman - read on for his tale of woe. Adam then keeps things
practical with his look at configuring an external hard disk
for maximum utility. In the news, Apple reschedules WWDC such
that it conflicts with MacHack, Al Gore joins Apple's Board of
Directors, the iPod gets an important update, and the CRT-based
iMac quietly disappears.
Topics:
MailBITS/24-Mar-03
Apple Moves WWDC 2003 to June in San Francisco
Publish (Electronically) and Perish?
Configuring a Utility Hard Disk
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MailBITS/24-Mar-03
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**iPod 1.2.6 Update Fixes Battery Drain** -- For several months
now, many iPod owners have been reporting dramatic decreases in
battery charge that minimize the music player's vaunted 10-hour
playing ability. Apple last week released iPod 1.2.6 Software
Update, which more accurately gauges the battery charge so the
iPod does not shut down prematurely. Apple claims that the update
offers longer standby time for all iPods and increases playback
time on scroll-wheel models. Separate updaters are available for
Mac OS X (5.2 MB), Mac OS 9 (6.2 MB), and Windows (12.6 MB). [JLC]
<http://www.apple.com/ipod/>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=122014>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120198>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120119>
**Al Gore Joins Apple Board** -- Companies like to populate their
board of directors with notable industry leaders, but in typical
Apple fashion the company has snagged a director with more name
value than most: former Vice President Al Gore. In making the
announcement, Steve Jobs cited Gore's experience of "having helped
run the largest organization in the world - the United States
Government." Although this is his first private sector board seat,
Gore brings more than just name recognition to the post: during
his 25 years of government service, he was instrumental in helping
to fund what became the Internet, he currently serves as a Senior
Advisor to Google, and he holds three visiting university
professorships. Gore fills the board seat formerly occupied by
Larry Ellison, who resigned last year due to scheduling conflicts.
Kudos to Apple for having the sense of humor to link to the Crazy
Apple Rumors commentary about Gore's election on the Apple Hot
News page. In a related move, Apple also announced a variety of
changes to corporate governance, including adding independent
directors, increasing the use of independent board committees,
and reducing the number of outstanding stock options. [JLC]
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/mar/19gore.html>
<http://www.crazyapplerumors.com/2003_03_16_archive.htm>
<http://www.apple.com/hotnews/>
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/mar/20governance.html>
**Apple Discontinues Original iMac** -- Nearly five years ago,
Apple bucked the general computing trend by thinking different and
releasing a gumdrop-shaped machine that reinvigorated the company
and ushered in a wave of translucent plastics. Last week, Apple
quietly discontinued the CRT iMac, which has been replaced by
the popular flat-screen iMac and the eMac. [JLC]
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/1998/may/6imac.html>
Apple Moves WWDC 2003 to June in San Francisco
----------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
With only two months notice, Apple has rescheduled its 2003
Worldwide Developers Conference for 23-Jun-03 through 27-Jun-03
in San Francisco's Moscone Center. The WWDC conference was
previously slated to take place May 19th through 23rd in San Jose.
Apple's stated rationale is to provide developers with a more
complete release of the next version of Mac OS X, code-named
Panther, and Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide
Developer Relations, said that moving WWDC to June "ensures
that every developer will leave the event with a copy of
Panther in their hands."
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/mar/21wwdc.html>
<http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/>
To accommodate the change, Apple has extended the WWDC Early Bird
registration discount to 23-May-03 (full refunds are also offered
through 23-May-03 for those who had already registered but can't
make the new dates). Cancelling hotel reservations shouldn't be a
major problem for attendees, and it appears Apple will be helping
those who already purchased non-refundable plane tickets. If that
includes you, contact the Apple Developer Connection, presumably
to register complaints or ask for assistance. There is some
precedent for Apple paying ticket change fees; when Apple
rescheduled Steve Jobs's keynote a day earlier at Macworld Expo
San Francisco two years ago, they helped press who needed to
change tickets and hotel reservations. Dave Polaschek has been
reporting his rescheduling efforts on his weblog; he's found
that Apple is trying to be accommodating, both in terms of helping
developers find hotel rooms in San Francisco (probably easy, given
the occupancy rate we saw during Macworld Expo in San Francisco)
and in working with airlines.
<http://developer.apple.com/contact/programs.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06666>
<http://davespicks.com/archive/2003/0321.html>
The real problem, however, is that the new dates for WWDC bump
against the annual grassroots MacHack developers conference,
currently scheduled for 19-Jun-03 through 21-Jun-03 in Detroit,
Michigan. Although there's no actual overlap, attendees have only
one day between the two conferences to travel and recuperate from
the long hours during MacHack. Worse, it's unlikely any Apple
employees could attend MacHack, since they'll be busy preparing
for WWDC. Other developers may opt out of MacHack due to the
amount of time away from work attending both conferences would
entail. Since Apple didn't contact the organizers of MacHack
in advance, they're still discussing what to do. Stay tuned.
<http://www.machack.com/>
Publish (Electronically) and Perish?
------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The revolution in electronic publishing of books is still
happening, though more slowly than many expected. But some of us
still try to nudge things along, as I did last year by letting
people who pre-ordered my iPhoto Visual QuickStart Guide download
a PDF version via Amazon. That was a huge success, with thousands
of copies sold. The book actually hit #2 on Amazon's best-seller
list briefly. However, a recent event shows that electronic
publishing, even when done with the best of intentions, can
have huge unintended consequences. More on those in a minute.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06787>
**Electronic iPhoto VQS** -- My experience encouraged me to go
further with my iPhoto 2 Visual QuickStart Guide, which I've now
finished writing and which should be out in late April or early
May. Although setting things up with Amazon was too much work, I
personally gave PDF versions of chapters to anyone who pre-ordered
the book. The folks who took me up on the offer have appreciated
it, from the feedback I've gotten, but the overall numbers were
rather disappointing. Only 39 people pre-ordered and asked to see
the pre-publication chapters; my estimate was somewhat higher.
It's possible that the TidBITS audience doesn't feel in need of
a book about iPhoto 2, but whatever the reason, it was probably
more work than was worthwhile for the effort. Live and learn.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07064>
(The offer remains open, and the entire book other than the
index is now available for download; just email your receipt to
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.)
**Real World Electronic Publishing** -- The positive experience
with the first edition of the iPhoto Visual QuickStart Guide has
convinced me that there is little or no downside to publishing
a book in electronic form, even though it can theoretically be
copied and shared without payment. The topic came up while Glenn
Fleishman and I were working on The Wireless Networking Starter
Kit, and in fact, we're pursuing a method of distributing an
electronic version of that book. But the most interesting
discussions we had surrounded the fate of Real World GoLive 6,
a 922-page tome that Glenn and TidBITS Managing Editor Jeff
Carlson wrote last year. Although this was essentially the third
edition of a book that had done well in previous editions, Real
World GoLive 6 suffered badly in the sales department. The
implosion of the dot-com economy (every company of which needed
a snazzy Web site) hurt the sales of both Web authoring software
and books about that software, and it seems as though Macromedia
Dreamweaver may be beating out GoLive for what remains of the
market. Whatever the reason, Glenn and Jeff's book was selling
terribly.
At some point when Glenn was moaning about the book's sales to me,
I suggested that perhaps they should just give it away as a PDF,
since clearly there weren't any sales that could be lost. If
anything, letting people download a copy and see if it had useful
information might drive some additional sales, and one way or
another, the months of work they put in wouldn't be sitting
unused on a shelf or in a warehouse.
Glenn and Jeff liked the idea, and so Glenn put the effort into
producing a PDF version of the book (doing it well is harder than
you'd expect). He then uploaded the file to a friend's server,
which is co-located in a rack at Level 3 Communications, a major
hosting company. Glenn put a note on the book's Web site and sent
out a few messages to announce the release, including one to
MacCentral, which picked up the story.
<http://www.level3.com/>
<http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0303/19.realworld.php>
That's when the insanity began. Thousands upon thousands of people
started downloading the book, which was a hefty 23 MB file. I was
chatting with Glenn that evening, and he was concerned about the
performance of the site. In an attempt to help, I ran the PDF
through PDF Enhancer, an amazing utility from PDF Sages that
shrinks PDF files by significant amounts and makes them draw
faster as well. Glenn didn't want the screenshots to get too
blurry, so I gave him back a PDF that was only 20 percent smaller
(at 40 percent smaller, the screenshots weren't as clear). But
Glenn was happy that the smaller file could improve performance,
and I went to bed thinking all was well.
<http://www.pdfsages.com/enhancer.html>
When I talked to Glenn the next day, though, it was clear that all
was not well, and he was in a state of shock. He had forgotten
that the co-located server at Level 3 Communications was charged
based on the ninth busiest hour in a month, at a rate that may
cost as much as $15,000 for that level of usage (over 200 GB
downloaded by more than 10,000 people). Unfortunately, Level 3
didn't have any bandwidth limiters or warnings in place. Since
it was inconceivable that anything he'd done on that server before
would have resulted in such usage, Glenn had simply blanked on the
possibility that it could result in massive charges, and the poor
sales of the paper edition meant that the instant popularity of
the PDF edition came as a huge surprise. Every decision Glenn had
made was reasonable, but the combination of them was financially
ruinous.
Needless to say, Glenn removed the file as soon as he realized,
but the damage was done, and he's been trying to figure out how
to recover since. Unfortunately, he has no way of contacting the
people who already downloaded the book to see if they'd be willing
to kick in a few bucks to help pay for the bandwidth. Since he's
most likely to get help from people who benefit, even in a small
way, from the electronic version of the book, he has made it
available again via the Info-Mac Archive's network of mirror sites
and thanks to the generosity of Bare Bones Software (the links are
on the book's home page, linked below). In the event that people
donate more than the final bandwidth bill (Level 3 hasn't said
what it will be yet), Glenn has said he'll donate the extra to
Project Gutenberg, the non-profit grandfather of all Internet
electronic book projects.
<http://www.realworldgolive.com/>
<http://www.gutenberg.org/>
The moral of the story is that there is a downside to electronic
publishing, and even those things you do with the best of
intentions can come back to bite you if not approached with the
utmost care. Glenn has certainly learned his lesson, and I hope
enough people will see fit to reward his generosity in giving
away the book for free that the lesson won't be too painful.
If you want to support authors distributing their books for
free, I encourage you to take a look at Real World GoLive 6
and consider helping out.
PayBITS: Help support electronic publishing - and Glenn's
sanity - by making a contribution via PayBITS!
* PayPal: <http://realworldgolive.com/paypal/>
* Amazon: <http://realworldgolive.com/amazon-honor>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Configuring a Utility Hard Disk
-------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Years ago, when APS Technologies was the dominant hard drive
vendor in the Macintosh world, I had a chat with Paul McGraw,
one of the co-founders of the company, about why APS was starting
to sell Macintosh clones. He said that since Apple was shipping
such large hard drives at the time, he thought the hard drive
aftermarket was going to become significantly less profitable.
He was probably correct, particularly given the size of drives
in today's Macs. Those of us who don't do video (which happily
eats all the disk space you can throw at it) are unlikely ever
to fill them.
But does that mean there's no reason for an external hard drive?
Far from it. For quite some time after I bought my first Power Mac
without SCSI, I lived without one. Not having a large external
drive made me uncomfortable, though, and I was surprised how
relieved I felt after buying one for secondary backups (primary
backups at the time were going to VXA-1 tape), testing backup
software, providing a boot disk for troubleshooting, and so on.
Should you rush right out and buy an external hard drive? It
mostly comes down to whether or not you're the type of person who
solves problems, either for yourself or for other people. Plenty
of people just use their Macs, and if something goes wrong, they
get help from elsewhere. Those people probably won't use an
external drive sufficiently to justify the cost. But for people
like me, who are always helping friends and relatives when we're
not whacking our own systems into shape, an external hard drive
is a necessity. Actually, that's a good question for a poll:
do you currently have an external utility hard drive? Vote on
our home page!
<http://www.tidbits.com/>
Over the last few months, I've been working with what feels like
the mother of all external drives - Maxtor's 250 GB Personal
Storage 5000. It isn't just a big FireWire and USB hard drive,
though - it offers OneTouch Backup, which is a physical button
on the front of the case that, when pushed, launches the bundled
Retrospect Express and backs up your internal hard drive. I
reviewed the Maxtor Personal Storage 5000 for Macworld recently;
go read that review for details.
<http://www.macworld.com/2003/03/reviews/maxtor5000/>
<http://maxtor.com/en/products/external/personal_storage_5000/>
Although I gave the drive a positive writeup in Macworld, I
criticized the product for its default configuration, which
actually duplicates the contents of your Mac's internal hard
drive to a folder on the Maxtor drive. That prevents it from
being bootable; Mac OS X's System folder and other important
support folders must apparently be at the top level of the disk
for it to boot. Maxtor also made a mistake in how they configured
the Duplicate action in Retrospect such that files you rename,
move, or delete on your internal hard drive appear multiple times
in the duplicate. So, what I'd like to do here is tell you how
to reconfigure the Maxtor Personal Storage 5000 to make it into
the ultimate utility drive. Don't worry if you don't have one
of these drives; this approach works equally as well with any
large FireWire hard drive and Retrospect Express. These
instructions are specific to Mac OS X, but much of the general
advice remains relevant for Mac OS 9 users who don't already
have a utility drive.
<http://www.dantz.com/products/mac_express/>
**A Clean Start** -- Unlike many external FireWire drives, the
Maxtor Personal Storage 5000 does not come pre-formatted, forcing
you to initialize it in Apple's Disk Utility. That's not a bad
thing, though, since I've seen problems on pre-formatted FireWire
drives from different manufacturers. Specifically, I could make
a duplicate to the drive using Retrospect Express, but I couldn't
convince that duplicate to boot into Mac OS X. Reformatting and
making another duplicate eliminated the problem.
As a result, I recommend you initialize any external FireWire
drive first thing, before you start using it. If you want to be
really sure that the drive is clean, click the Options button
in Disk Utility's Erase tab and select "Zero all data" as well.
There's one other decision you may need to make at this point.
Will you ever want to open your FireWire drive, extract the drive
mechanism, and install it in your Mac with its contents intact?
I haven't found solid information on this topic, but some people
have had trouble using a mechanism connected to the IDE/ATA bus if
it was initialized in the FireWire drive enclosure. To be safe,
first initialize the drive inside your Mac, and then put it back
in the FireWire case; obviously, this isn't a possibility for
PowerBook or iBook owners, unless you have a friend with a Power
Mac that can be used to initialize the drive. I did not do this
with the Personal Storage 5000, but I did make the extra effort
with the bare drives I bought for use with Granite Digital's
FireVue FireWire drive bay, which I'm now using for backups and
which I'll write more about soon.
<http://granitedigital.com/catalog/pg26_firewireidehotswapdrive.htm>
Should you partition at this point? Although I used to partition
religiously, I'm no longer a huge fan of them, and the system
I describe below works well for backing up multiple Macs without
partitioning. Unless you have a specific reason for partitioning,
I wouldn't bother.
**Make It Bootable, Make It Useful** -- Any good utility drive
must be bootable, because you may need to use it when your Mac's
internal hard drive isn't able to start the Mac. Plus, if you
ever want to reformat your hard disk and restore from backup,
a drive that can boot the Mac simplifies the process
significantly. (Otherwise you must reformat using your Mac OS
installation CD-ROM, reinstall the Mac OS, and then restore
over the newly installed copy of the operating system.)
There are two ways of making your FireWire utility disk bootable,
and which you choose depends on the size of the disk and your
situation. If you're the only person who is likely to use the
disk, even if on another person's machine, the easiest way to make
it bootable might be to use Retrospect Express to make a duplicate
of your internal hard disk to the external disk. You wouldn't want
to do that if other people might be using the external drive, or
if the duplicate would take up too much of the useful space on
that disk.
The other alternative is to install clean copies of Mac OS 9 and
Mac OS X on the external disk. You definitely want both, since
some troubleshooting tools still run only in Mac OS 9. Plus, you
never know what sort of Mac you'll want to use with your utility
drive, so having Mac OS 9 available for older Macs that have never
seen Mac OS X is a good idea. I opted to install clean versions of
both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on the Maxtor Personal Storage 5000.
Although Apple provides some basic utilities with both versions
of the Mac OS (Drive Setup and Disk First Aid in Mac OS 9, and
Disk Utility in Mac OS X), you should also install any other
troubleshooting utilities you may have, such as Alsoft's
DiskWarrior or Symantec's Norton Utilities (the Norton SystemWorks
bundle is a good way to acquire Norton Utilities and Retrospect
Express all at once). Also be sure to install Retrospect Express
or whatever other backup software you may use. Remember that this
disk will also hold your backups, so you want to be able to boot
from it, reinitialize your internal hard disk, and restore from
backup with a minimum of fuss.
<http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/>
<http://www.symantec.com/nu/nu_mac/>
<http://www.symantec.com/sabu/sysworks/mac/>
**Default Retrospect Express Configuration** -- Let's now look
closely at how the Maxtor Personal Storage 5000 configures
Retrospect Express by default, and how you can reconfigure
it to meet your needs better.
The magic of the Personal Storage 5000's OneTouch button is that
when you press the button, software that's installed on your Mac
automatically launches Retrospect Express and executes a
Retrospect Express script called "Maxtor OneTouch."
A bit of background: Retrospect Express scripts are nothing like
AppleScript scripts - they're merely an automated way of telling
Retrospect Express exactly what to back up and where to store the
results. They come in three basic types: Backup scripts, Duplicate
scripts, and Archive scripts. Backup scripts create backup sets,
which store multiple versions of changed files and which only
Retrospect Express can read. Duplicate scripts duplicate the
selected files or disk to the destination as files in the Finder,
but changed files are overwritten with the current version on
subsequent runs. Archive scripts remove the files from your
hard disk once copied elsewhere - avoid them unless you're
sure of what you're doing.
The default Maxtor OneTouch script is a Duplicate script, so
the "backup" you get from using it is actually a duplicate of
your hard disk on the Maxtor Personal Storage 5000. That's not
terrible, but with a duplicate, you lose access to previous
versions of files, so if a file becomes corrupt, you could easily
end up with only the corrupt version on your backup. True backups
store multiple versions of changed files so you can revert to an
earlier version that doesn't have the corruption.
The problems arise in the way Maxtor chose to configure the
Duplicate script. First, they chose to store the duplicate in
a folder at the top level of the Personal Storage 5000. That
decision makes it a bit easier to back up multiple Macs to the
same drive (since each would be in its own folder), but also makes
it so the duplicate cannot boot a Mac in Mac OS X. Mac OS 9 isn't
as picky about the location of its System Folder. Although I
haven't confirmed this, I also worry about permissions confusions
during restores, if you've backed up multiple Macs to standard
files on the same disk. Still, this is a design decision, and
it's not inherently wrong.
What is wrong is the way Maxtor sets the Replace Corresponding
Files option in the Maxtor OneTouch Duplicate script. If you
make a backup, and then move, rename, or delete a file from your
internal hard disk, then perform another backup, you may find the
results confusing. Thanks to the Replace Corresponding Files
option, Retrospect Express won't see the original files on the
duplicate as corresponding, so it won't replace them. In short,
you will end up with the original file and another in the new
location, with the new name, or in the Trash. It's a potential
nightmare when the time comes to restore, since you must sort
through and figure out which of the files is the correct version.
If you decide to stick with a Duplicate script, you can fix this
misbehavior: Launch Retrospect Express, select the Automate tab,
and click the Scripts button. Then, double-click the Maxtor
OneTouch script to edit it, click the Destinations button, and
choose Replace Entire Disk from the pop-up menu. Close and save
and you won't have to worry about multiple versions of the same
files littering your backup.
**Better Retrospect Express Configuration** -- However, I don't
recommend you follow the above instructions, because even though
a Duplicate script may seem the most obvious way to back up for
a novice user, it's simply not the best way to back up, period.
Good backups store multiple versions of changed files, and for
good backups, you want to use a Backup script. With just a pinch
of cleverness, you can still use the OneTouch button on the
Personal Storage 5000 to initiate the backups.
(For those of you who are following along, but don't have a
Personal Storage 5000, never fear, since you can easily initiate
a backup in Retrospect Express by creating a "run document" that,
when opened, does exactly the same thing as pressing the OneTouch
button. Just choose the script from Retrospect Express's Run menu
and save it to a file from the Manual Execution dialog.)
The trick is the name of the script. First, we rename the existing
script to get it out of the way. Select the Maxtor OneTouch script
in the Scripts window and from the Scripts menu, choose Rename and
call it something like "old Maxtor OneTouch." Now we replace it.
Click the New button in the Scripts window, and choose Backup when
Retrospect Express prompts you for a type of script. Next,
Retrospect Express asks you to name the script. Call it "Maxtor
OneTouch" (without the quotes, of course). The name is important -
if you get it wrong, the OneTouch button won't do anything. When
you're done, Retrospect opens the Backup: Maxtor OneTouch window
where you configure your script.
Click the Sources button, and in the Volume Selection dialog,
select your internal hard disk and click OK. Assuming you only
want to back up one disk (Retrospect Express would be happy to
do more if you have multiple partitions), click OK to close the
Maxtor OneTouch: Sources dialog and return to the Backup: Maxtor
OneTouch window.
Click the Destinations button next, and in the Backup Set
Selection dialog, click the New button to bring up the Backup Set
Creation dialog. From the Backup set type pop-up menu, choose
File, set a password if you feel it's necessary, and give your
backup set a name in the Name field (I usually append "Backup"
to the name of the hard disk I'm backing up). Click the New
button, and in the Save dialog that appears, save the backup
set on the Personal Storage 5000, perhaps at the top level or
in the main user's Documents folder - it doesn't matter.
Back in Backup Set Selection dialog again, select your
newly created backup set, click OK, and click OK once more
in the Maxtor OneTouch: Destinations window.
Back in the Backup: Maxtor OneTouch window, click the Selecting
button to open the Maxtor OneTouch: Selecting dialog. Choose All
Files Except Cache Files from the pop-up menu (there's no reason
to back up Web browser cache files), and click OK to return to
the Backup: Maxtor OneTouch window.
You could, if you wanted, fiddle with the options, but you want
verification and data compression turned on, so the defaults
are fine. And, particularly for folks who don't have a Personal
Storage 5000, you could also set a regular schedule on which
Retrospect Express would automatically back up your Mac. But if
you're going to rely on the OneTouch button, there's less need
to do that. Close the Backup: Maxtor OneTouch window, and when
prompted, save your changes. Quit Retrospect Express
That's it, and from now on, when you press the OneTouch button,
Retrospect Express launches and executes your Maxtor OneTouch
script, backing up your Mac to the Personal Storage 5000. The
first time will take a while, of course, but subsequent backups
will be much faster, since they don't have to copy as much data.
**Multiple Macs** -- What if you want to use the 250 GB Personal
Storage 5000 to back up multiple Macs in an office? All you must
do is connect the Personal Storage 5000 to each Mac in turn, and
then run through the process outlined above for creating a Maxtor
OneTouch script for each machine. It's easiest to create a
separate backup set for each computer, rather than directing all
the backups into a single backup set. Then, all you must do to
initiate a backup is to plug the drive into the Mac and into an
electrical outlet, wait for it to mount on the Desktop, and then
press the OneTouch button.
Still, there are two issues to consider. First, plugging and
unplugging cables, both FireWire and power, can be a royal pain if
you have to root around behind desks and look for unused sockets.
It might be worth buying some extra FireWire cables and Maxtor
power adapters so the cables are easily accessible. Second, the
license for the bundled copy of Retrospect Express is technically
only for a single computer, so it's up to you to decide if you're
comfortable interpreting the license such that it's acceptable to
use that copy of Retrospect Express with multiple Macs as long as
you use it only with the Maxtor Personal Storage 5000 drive.
**Recap** -- Lest all this seem overwhelming, let's recap what
we've done here. We reinitialized the disk, which is a good idea
with any new external drive. Then we made it bootable, either by
duplicating the internal hard disk to it, or by installing clean
versions of both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. We also installed all
troubleshooting and backup utilities so they'd be available when
needed. Then we configured Retrospect Express to make good backups
rather than the less-useful duplicates.
Run through these steps with your external FireWire drive, whether
or not it's from Maxtor, and you'll be all set the next time
trouble comes knocking on your Mac's door.
PayBITS: If Adam's advice helped you set up a utility hard disk in
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