Norman Rowe wrote:
Also the OS X must be in an 8 gig first partition.
This isn't necessarily true. The installer CD requires the 1st 8 GB or less to install OS X, and it normally OS X won't boot past the 1st 8 GB, but if you use Panther Disk Utility to Restore a previous OS X installation or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone OS X to a partition or whole drive past or larger than the 1st 8 GB you can then use ANY "Helper Disk" to boot the larger partition or drive. A "helper disk" is a disk within the 1st 8 GB that is on one of the bootable internal buses: SCSI or ATA or bootable PCI ATA, and this helper can be tiny since the helper function only needs a few MB to boot the larger "illegal" partition or drive.
This gets especially intriguing if you have a bootable OS X partition within the 1st 8 GB already that you can use to enable a larger "illegal" partition or drive. OS X enables many "PC" versions of PCI cards, for example, all the Adaptec SCSI cards, and also Acard and even "generic ATA PC cards" are "supported" in OS X Panther. This means that if you can boot into OS X to begin with, then drives on these "PC" cards that lack Mac boot ROMs will mount normally under OS X. When they are mounted, they are visible to XPF and when you run XPF you can use the "helper drive" as to boot from these normally "unbootable" PC card drives. This is because the helper starts the boot process on the legal helper drive and the PC card drive is able to be recognized by the boot process before the "hand-off" occurs. Since PC cards are much cheaper and more available than Mac, having a legal OS X boot drive can enable the booting of larger illegal (outside of 1st 8 GB) drives that are even possibly attached to normally unbootable PC PCI card buses.
It's really a fantastic thing, the "helper drive" boot process. It's actually just an extension of the process that allows XPF to boot the normally unbootable OS X installer CD, but the uses are much greater if you understand the full power of having the ability to transfer the boot from a legal 1st 8 GB area to an illegal device irrespective of whether the illegal device is an installer CD, a Firewire drive, a giant 250 GB drive, or a PC card attached drive. They'll all boot using the helper drive process. It's the single key insight that XPF is based upon and what makes XPF so wonderful. Otherwise XPF would just be a "patch", which it isn't. It's the ability to hand-off the entire boot process from one drive that's recognized by the firmware (ROM-hardware that's unmodifiable on unsupported machines) to another drive that is recognized by OS X (software, and thus modifiable). XPF also happens to "patch" the System during this process, but that's really secondary. We could have been forced to patch and burn custom installer CD's, but instead this wonderful helper drive hand-off allows us to boot virtually any unbootable device using the helper. It's truly the most powerful aspect of XPF that is generally overlooked by most users of unsupported Macs.
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