Firewire Concerns

[jdaudio02]

We are running Retrospect 4.3 on a G4 Mac OS 9.2 and are in the process of purchasing a 100GB FireWire External hard drive and are just wondering if there are any significant issues that have come up when trying to backup from an external firewire drive using 4.3...Also, are there any other software driver concerns that need to be taken care of so we can successfully implement the previously described scenario.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks

 

 

 

jdaudio02

[jreffner]

I have 2 firewire (ext.) connected to my Mac. One is simply for storing MP3s and installers. The other is a 120 GB drive that is partitioned into 3 drives. Each partition is for backing up a drive. Two of the drives are local (in my G4), and the 3rd is backed up over a LAN via TCP/IP & a Retrospect client. I Duplicate the drives rather than Back Up because I can simply boot from any of the FireWire partitions (OS X; OS 9; G3 Server) and duplicate the FW partition of my choice back to the internal hard drive that has been damaged. This saves me the time of reinstalling the Mac OS & Retrospect, and then accessing the BackUp (rather than Duplicate) to back the BackUp back down to the internal drive. This is just my choice though.

 

 

 

Mistakes I made:

 

 

 

Initially, instead of partitioning the drive I created 3 folders to Duplicate the 3 drives to. This works, but only allows me to boot from 1 of the 3 duplicates. By partitioning, I can boot from any of the 3 drives (except forro the G3 server due to it having the wrong files to boot a G4).

 

 

 

If you want an OS X drive to mount when you're booted under OS 9, then be sure to Boot from the Mac OS X installer CD and use Drive Utility to format/initialize the hard drive. When you do it, be sure to check the option that says"Incluse OS 9 Drivers". If that isn't checked, you won't be able to see the drive under OS 9.

 

 

 

I hope that helps!

 

 

 

Jim