External Hard Drives

[abudhu]

Question:

Would it be possible to hook an External HD with an OS (Say Win XP/SuSE9.2) to one of the macs and have it boot up with the External HD's OS? Or would the different architectures or PC vs MAC mess it up? If this is possible that would rule.

[djmeis]

it would totally freak out.

Even if you tried to boot from it on another x86 machine (ie, if I tried to take an HD from an ECE machine and boot from it in shantz without stripping the drivers), it would freak out.

Never hurts to try though ;P

[fischerm]

While you can use an external HD to boot a machine, it has to be an OS that the machine can run. Macs being macs can't run WinXP. If you had a drive with YellowDog linux installed on it (http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/), you could use that drive to boot the mac, as its a PPC version of linux. Similarly if you had an external HD with WinXP on it (admidadly it would have to have the correct drivers) you could boot a machine that had say 2k installed on its internal drive.

[abudhu]

Alright, then wouldnt having a 3 partitioned HD work?
1 Partition to XP
1 Partition to SuSE (Since I like Linux)
1 Partition to Mac OS X

A HD is an HD...If so then wouldn't it work.

I just think it would be cool because then we could do LAN parties, via MLL resources. Those computers are pretty well built to manage most games anyways. All we would need to supply would be our External HD's. Play a Private game of CS or Raid in WoW, or some Deathmatch in UT2K4.


Also, if I were to do this, could I plug it into the MLL comps and run my Own OS without fear of someone getting mad? | Edit: Er..Off hours of course.

[dparm]

For some reason my computer refuses to boot to external (USB) hard drives.

I currently use a USB external HDD with my laptop for additional storage, and tried installing Windows to it once. The install went fine, and it showed up as a valid bootable OS after the BIOS loaded. However, about 5 seconds into the load, I get a BSOD. I've tried various things like updating the BIOS, but nothing seems to work.

I don't know if this is specific to my machine, or if in general, Windows doesn't boot well from removable media.

[abudhu]

Well its always worth a shot.

I have found that buying a normal HD, and then a seperate enclosure to be 1) cheaper and 2) might work better...

I am easily entertained.

[abudhu]

Just recieved my WD 80GB HD, and MaPower Enclosure.

?: Will MACS Read NTFS formatted drives? I don't see why not...

[amichel]

You asked this NTFS thing somewhere else, and I answered it there. I think it was the Mac forum. As to "an HD is an HD", sure. A raw, unformatted, HD is platform agnostic. Once you put a filesystem on it, it is no longer agnostic. As to the multiple partitions. It may work, and it may not work. You'll need a prime-time bootloader to make that happen properly. I'd suggest Grub, which is a linux bootloader, though I haven't the foggiest idea if you can set it up to work with OS X. It's not as easy as:

1. Make 3 partitions
2. Format and install different OSes in each
3. ???
4. Profit!

Most likely, you'll have trouble with this. It may be surmountable, it may not be. If you're not very familiar with configuring a boot loader, read up on it. You'll need to be pretty comfortable with whichever one you choose.

This idea you have, it is not particularly easy, or practical in general. Why would you want a drive with 3 OSes on it?

[fischerm]

You won't really have any trouble with the Mac partition. To boot a mac from a different drive just connect the drive, hold down the option key on startup and a list of available boot volumes will show up. The open firmware will only list volumes with viable boot-able OSes. Choose your drive and you're off and running.

[amichel]

A very valid point Mark. :D I just don't know how Open Firmware deals with drives where MacOS doesn't control the MBR. I've never actually tried it.

[dparm]

If anyone needs a test external HDD, I can "loan" mine out for the experiment.