One Drive to Boot All Macs
Dan Knight wrote:
Thanks for the info on USIB. For years I've been
buying FireWire/USB 2.0 drive enclosures because they're more flexible
(my current choice: NewerTech's miniStack v2 - and the newer v3 adds
eSATA and FireWire 800 to the mix for $50 more). In my mind, eSATA is
going to replace both as the preferred way of attaching a hard drive to
personal computers. Considering that all Intel Macs uses SATA, I'm
surprised that Apple hasn't yet made an eSATA port a standard feature
on any Mac. That day will come.
I have also been impressed with the miniStack v2/v3 and have just
purchased a couple of v3 units for much needed backup storage drives. I
was disappointed that the eSATA cables weren't included. They can't
cost more than $2-3 in bulk. That's kind of like leaving the USB cable
out of the printer box. Many of the people who will be opting to buy
the v3 over the v2 will be doing so because of the eSATA port, not just
for FireWire 800. Doesn't make much sense for them to leave the eSATA
cables out.
Here's the main problem with eSATA as a competitor to FireWire, and
probably one of the main reasons that Apple doesn't want to use up
valuable port space to put it on new Macs, especially on portables:
No bus power. Every single eSATA device, no matter how small,
will have to be powered with a separate power cable from a power
adapter or USB port. That's one of those unfathomable design decisions
that give us a reason to use the following Three Letter Acronym: WTF?
Of course for some reason the power connector for SATA is twice the
size of the data connector with twice as many wires, so they were sort
of screwed from the get-go when trying to create an external SATA
spec.
It's a nice option and the fastest connection for self-powered
external drives attached to desktop machines that don't move around,
but I doubt it can compete with FireWire in the portability area unless
they could somehow manage to integrate bus power without making the
connector any larger. The eSATA data-only connector is already wider
than either FireWire 400 or 800 connectors. Plus FireWire is not
limited to disk storage devices; it can also be used for networking,
controlling external devices, etc. Considering all that, I don't think
FireWire will be replaced by eSATA in popularity anytime soon. And I
seem to recall reading about FireWire eventually working its way up to
3.2 Gbps speeds, which would match even SATA-II. Interestingly the
final 1394c spec was just published in June of this year. I wouldn't be
surprised if FireWire 1600 ports started showing up in the next Mac Pro
generation.
I'm not so sure about USIB. On the one hand, it
simplifies things: One USIB device plus a set of USIB adapters works
almost anywhere (SCSI is about the only protocol not supported). But
it's an expensive solution: $26 for the USB 2.0, FireWire, and
CardBus/PC Card USIB adapters, $30 for eSATA. Then add the cost of a
USIB enclosure. And there's no pass-through FireWire port, which most
FireWire drives offer.
True, going with a USIB device is far from the cheapest or simplest
solution, like the many "all-in-one" devices out there, and I wouldn't
recommend it to everyone. But it has its purposes, especially if you
want to be able to move a device between being docked with a computer
in a cartridge system (and connected internally via your choice of IDE,
USB, FireWire, eSATA, SATA or SCSI with an IDE-to-SCSI adapter) and
being a portable external self-powered or bus-powered device (connected
via your choice of USB, FireWire, or eSATA). Want to shift a single
backup drive between a FireWire laptop, an IDE-only Windows desktop
machine, and a SATA-only desktop machine, with the desktops treating
the drive as an internal drive? No problem, USIB can bridge that gap.
Get a USIB enclosure for the drive, a USIB-FireWire adapter cable, a
USIB-IDE cradle and a USIB-SATA cradle.
If I needed ultimate flexibility, I think I'd pick a
NewerTech miniStack v3 enclosure for $120, as it includes USB 2.0 and
FireWire hubs plus USB, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 cables. (eSATA
is not included.) It's not a small enclosure, but it has a good heat
sink.
If an enclosure exists that supports SCSI plus
FireWire and USB 2.0, I can't find it. I think you're going to need a
separate SCSI drive for your Macs that can't boot from FireWire.
The miniStack is no good as a portable device.
There isn't one enclosure that supports SCSI directly, but a USIB
enclosure can be used as a FireWire device with the correct adapter
cable, then inserted into a USIB-to-IDE docking cradle which would then
of course need an IDE-to-SCSI adapter added on. What is interesting is
that behind that SCSI adapter you could have several different
combinations of IDE, SATA, USIB to IDE or SATA and so on, but all the
computer would care about is the SCSI adapter. Further on down the
chain, Addonics makes various IDE, SATA, and size adapters for Compact
Flash, Secure Digital, ATAPI optical drives, and 1.8" hard drives, so
potentially you could have a stack of USIB enclosures containing any of
a half dozen different kinds of media that could be connected to at
least a half dozen different kinds of internal and external computer
interfaces and shifted at the drop of a hat to any other interface for
which there is a USIB adapter available.
So no, it wouldn't be pretty, or cheap, but I bet I could get that
SCSI PowerBook booting from any bootable media you care to name, and
then use that same media on many other kinds of Macs (without removing
it from its enclosure!). You won't be doing that anytime soon with a
miniStack.
On the other hand, most folks should just get a miniStack or one of
those triple or quad interface portable enclosures, since that's all
they will ever have a need for. Only us mad scientist types would have
uses for a truly universal interface. The infinite potential
combinations has driven me to the brink of insanity. Wait
. . . There, I am insane now.[*] Muwahahahaha!
Tell me more about your disk image discovery, as this
could be invaluable to those who have to support multiple Macs - or
people who need to downgrade from OS X 10.4.10 for some reason. (In my
case, because my Brother laser printer doesn't work with it.) This
could make a good article for Low End Mac.
Well, I haven't actually had the time or a spare partition to
implement it, nor can I remember the exact details of how it's done,
but when I was poking around one of the OSx86 site forums I saw a lot
of posts aimed at newbies that described basically taking the DMG file
and (I think) opening it with Disk Utility and simply "restoring" the
image to a spare hard drive partition with ASR, rather than attempting
to burn it to a DVD. I think this came up mainly because in that
particular forum they were talking about the Leopard beta install DVD
images, which are apparently too large for a single-layer DVD, and a
lot of people still do not have dual-layer burners, so the only way
many of them could boot the image was by creating a small 9 GB
hard drive partition on which to install the DVD image. They then
proceeded to boot from that partition and do the actual installation
onto another partition on the same hard drive.
Of course even for much smaller CD-ROM and DVD images it makes a lot
of sense to boot them from a much faster hard disk device if possible.
There's no reason that I know of that it wouldn't work, since most Mac
boot discs simply contain a standard HFS+ disk image of a system that
was originally put together on a hard drive and then turned into a
read-only disk image to be burned to a CD or DVD. The system is just
tweaked so that none of the software has a problem with being run from
a read-only media, that's the only real difference with a typical live
system running from a hard drive. AFAIK.
Now, since a standard Mac-formatted hard drive using the Apple
Partition Map partition scheme can apparently be sectioned off into at
least 16 separate partitions (that's what comes up in Disk Utility
anyway, I've never tried more than about six on any single drive), that
means it may be possible to have at least 16 different bootable
partitions on a single drive, each containing bootable images of
various CD or DVD utilities and OS installation discs from classic Mac
OS on up through the various Tiger Universal and Intel boot discs (and
of course Leopard as soon as it becomes available). They would boot up
several times faster than booting directly from the optical media.
Now, this is yet another reason I have been hankering for a FireWire
Compact Flash card reader, as it would be a great way to carry around
an assortment of bootable disk images on different sizes of CF cards.
Even the cheapest CF cards are probably faster than a typical CD, while
the newest high-end cards are moving beyond 40 MBytes per second
speeds, faster than some hard drives. The final piece of the puzzle is
finding a read-only CF card reader with either an IDE or FireWire
interface. I found a read-only FW-IDE bridge once meant for forensic
investigators making copies of hard drives, but it was priced at $110.
Secure Digital cards have a read-write switch, but it seems CF cards
and IDE devices in general weren't meant to be made read-only.
A bit much for regular Mac users to attempt, but for techies like me
it seems like a godsend that this is even possible. I am somewhat
disappointed that I never thought of doing it. I'm sure many technical
users have been doing it for years already. Again, I haven't actually
implemented this and forget the details of what was posted, so until
you or I can verify that this works and what, if any, limitations there
are, I wouldn't want to make an article out of it.
That said, I have felt for some time that it is a good idea for a
typical Mac hard drive to have a separate small partition for rescue
purposes, with a basic no-frills install of OS X along with at
least SuperDuper!, if not other troubleshooting utilities like
DiskWarrior, DataRescue, or FileSalvage. Now I can also see that it may
be a good idea to have yet another partition dedicated to keeping a
bootable image of the system restore or retail OS X install disc.
A lot of nontechnical people seem to have no trouble with doing an
Archive & Install or permission repair from the DVD. Doing it from
a hard drive partition would be just as easy and a lot
faster.
Imaging your system restore discs to a couple of hard drive
partitions would negate the need to keep the discs with the computer
and reduce the chance of losing or damaging the discs. This is
especially important for notebook users. The images would never change,
so backing them up once to an external drive would cover a failure of
the internal drive.
Another benefit, what if:
- your optical drive is busted, or
- you don't have the restore discs, or
- you've replaced the optical drive with an MCE Optibay hard drive,
and
- you don't have any bootable external optical drive with you,
and
- you do have a backup drive but it's not bootable for some reason,
or
- etcetera, etcetera.
Well, simply having one of these alternate partitions, especially
one containing an imaging utility like SuperDuper (even Disk Utility
can do it, technically) can save the user in many of these cases if
they need to do an emergency restore in the field, as long as the
internal drive still functions or they have a bootable external hard
drive containing one of these alternate partitions.
Even notebook drives are getting large enough to make it no big deal
to dedicate all that space to something that may never be used but
could really save your bacon if something goes wrong. My mind is
reeling with the possibilities.
Here's a question for you: Got an open position for a tech writer
there? [8^\/)
Kris F.
Kris,
Thanks for clarifying. You've got my brain running in
high gear.
Partitioning is a wonderful tool, but the thing that
really amazes me is that Alsoft can create a bootable CD or FireWire
drive that can boot into various versions of the classic Mac OS and
OS X depending on what the computer can run. Just one of the
things I love about DiskWarrior, and that should make it a perfect
candidate for copying to a bootable partition.
I've been partitioning for years and years: operating
system & applications, work files, and emergency, which is a
bootable partition for troubleshooting. Every serious Mac user should
at the very least have an emergency partition that can hold the same
version of the Mac OS they normally use (Disk Utility loses some
features if your main partition is newer than your emergency one) plus
favorite utilities.
Compact Flash is pretty incredible stuff. CD-ROM tops
out at about 52x - anything faster and the discs can literally shatter.
There are high speed CF cards have reached 266x and maybe faster, and
266x equates to 40 MBps (320 Mbps)! That's within the bandwidth of
FireWire 400 and the top real world speed of USB 2.0. And that's faster
than some hard drives. The only real benefit of hard drives is a lot
more storage space; today's CF can be faster, albeit more costly. And
that's coming down.
Now I understand the attraction of a FireWire Compact
Flash reader. Create a set of bootable CF cards, plug in the one you
need, and boot a Mac for troubleshooting very quickly and quietly. As
CF capacity increased, USB 2.0 and FireWire readers could be a better
solution than USIB.
Working with disk images would eliminate one of my
biggest problems - locating the Install CD or DVD when I need it. You
wouldn't believe how many Mac OS install CDs I have, as well as a few
versions of BeOS.
And, yes, we can always use a tech writer who knows
the Mac. Tech types tend to gravitate to Windows and build their own
PCs or Linux and build their own optimized operating system. Tech types
on the Mac are a rare and valued commodity.
Dan
Dan Knight wrote:
Thanks for clarifying. You've got my brain running in
high gear.
Partitioning is a wonderful tool, but the thing that
really amazes me is that Alsoft can create a bootable CD or FireWire
drive that can boot into various versions of the classic Mac OS and OS
X depending on what the computer can run. Just one of the things I love
about DiskWarrior, and that should make it a perfect candidate for
copying to a bootable partition.
I don't think that's a specific feature of DiskWarrior. CDs and DVDs
can contain multiple sessions with different bootable images, even for
completely different platforms, just as easily as hard drives can be
partitioned. The only thing that can choose which image (and the
kernel therein) to boot from is the Startup Manager or boot ROM
built into the Mac hardware. In the case of the DiskWarrior CD both a
Mac OS X "System" folder and a Mac OS 9 "System Folder" are probably
installed on the same session and the hardware chooses which to boot
based on its built-in capabilities. Systems incapable of booting from
an OS X kernel will simply find the OS 9 System Folder and boot from
that.
Any Mac-bootable disk image from any media should actually
work with the imaging method I described, no matter what kind of media
it originally came from. Bootable Mac discs probably all use HFS/HFS+
for the filesystem and APM for the partition scheme, so all Macs
including Intel Macs should at least be able to show them in the
Startup Manager.
I wonder how many icons the Startup Manager has room for before they
start running off the screen. Having multiple drives attached with 16
bootable partitions on each one would really be something to see.
I've been partitioning for years and years: operating
system & applications, work files, and emergency, which is a
bootable partition for troubleshooting. Every serious Mac user should
at the very least have an emergency partition that can hold the same
version of the Mac OS they normally use (Disk Utility loses some
features if your main partition is newer than your emergency one) plus
favorite utilities.
Yes, I noticed that, although I forget exactly which features don't
work. The rescue image would have to be kept updated, which complicates
things. But for just an emergency partition solely for re-imaging the
main partition from a backup, it doesn't have to be up to date. The
cloning apps can be told to not copy any files or folders of your
choosing. Perhaps there is a way to design a script for SuperDuper that
would copy a bootable but extremely stripped-down version of your main
system onto the rescue partition. That way you'd only have to keep the
main system updated and just refresh the rescue clone afterward. I'm
sure this is doable.
In fact I may even email the SuperDuper support guys about the idea
of them creating a preconfigured script to copy the smallest, most
basic version of your system onto a small partition for this very
purpose. The user would then only need to add whatever utilities they
want rather than going through the much more complex process of
stripping things out. Good idea.
Compact Flash is pretty incredible stuff. CD-ROM tops
out at about 52x - anything faster and the discs can literally shatter.
There are high speed CF cards have reached 266x and maybe faster, and
266x equates to 40 MBps (320 Mbps)! That's within the bandwidth of
FireWire 400 and the top real world speed of USB 2.0. And that's faster
than some hard drives. The only real benefit of hard drives is a lot
more storage space; today's CF can be faster, albeit more costly. And
that's coming down.
Lexar has some 300x cards now, actually, and their current FireWire
card reader is FW 800. I think they've discontinued the FW 400 model.
There were some good rebates going around for the new cards and the old
card readers, but I'm not sure if that's still happening. At one point
the Lexar 300x 8 GB card was available for around $150 after
rebates. But as you point out, even a 66x card should be faster than
even the fastest CD drives, and those midrange cards are cheap.
Working with disk images would eliminate one of my
biggest problems - locating the Install CD or DVD when I need it. You
wouldn't believe how many Mac OS install CDs I have, as well as a few
versions of BeOS.
Oh yes I would. Ah, BeOS, we hardly new ye. R4.5 was a thing of
beauty.
It was fun while it lasted. I participated in the community and even
conversed a few times with Scott Hacker, the author of The BeOS
Bible. But one day I woke up and noticed that there were no
applications, and the Internet was leaving NetPositive behind. BeOS was
a beautiful toy that was going nowhere. I said as much to Scott, and it
was shortly thereafter that he, one of the strongest proponents of the
BeOS for years, also started to become disenchanted with the situation,
realizing that both Windows and Linux were starting to outclass the
BeOS in many areas, or at least they were rapidly catching up. He wrote
a couple of articles right about then that must have been difficult but
said what needed to be said, and pretty much marked the beginning of
the end in my mind. The release of R5 made very little difference at
that point. So sad.
I've gotten into the habit of imaging all my software and system
discs with Disk Utility just so that I'll have a backup when I can't
find the original. At the very least I can burn a new disc. Now it
seems like I can also stick the bootable ones on a spare hard drive
partition and save myself a lot of time that normally be spent waiting
for the system to boot from a CD or DVD. Some of those utility discs
take up to 10 minutes just to start up.
And, yes, we can always use a tech writer who knows
the Mac. Tech types tend to gravitate to Windows and build their own
PCs or Linux and build their own optimized operating system. Tech types
on the Mac are a rare and valued commodity.
I did the Linux thing for a while after being burned by the death of
Be, Inc. The BeOS died not just because they couldn't break through
Microsoft's monopoly but because they kept it proprietary and refused
to release it to the community when the company went down the drain. I
figured an open source OS would be safer. Well, Linux can't die, but
the overall Linux community has a very poor understanding of actual
usability and polish. Every distro I tried from Debian to Mandrake to
Gentoo was so full of usability potholes that I was constantly spending
about half my time in the command line either fixing things or just
trying to figure out how to do something that should have been simple,
or find and install the software necessary to get feature X working. It
was bizarre and ridiculous, and I finally gave up on it and returned to
Windows for a while.
Then I got a job as a tech support guy at a small nonprofit that had
luckily been switched over to Macs by my predecessor. Power Mac G4s,
mostly. They were still running Mac OS 9, but when they got me a
computer it came with 10.2, and when OS X finally became really
usable (10.3.3) I switched everyone over. That place is where I got
most of my experience with OS X and Macs in general. They finally
ran out of their cushy government funding and had to let myself and a
couple of other people go a couple of years ago, but they recently
called me in as an independent contractor, and I upgraded all their
systems to Tiger and convinced them to spend a little cash on maxing
out the RAM. Things work so well that they often don't call me for
several months at a time. Except when someone decides to rename their
home folder and then wonders why everything crashes and all their
settings disappear after they reboot, like this morning. Hmm.
...I don't think [Linux] will ever be able to
rival either Windows or Mac OS X in the usability space.
I still try out the popular desktop oriented Linux distros like
Ubuntu, Fedora, and SuSE about once a year, and I'm still fairly
unimpressed. Despite advancements there are still major problems with
even basic hardware like video cards and network cards. Without a
single set of coherent desktop standards to work toward, I don't think
they will ever be able to rival either Windows or Mac OS X in the
usability space. Well, maybe Windows, since Windows keeps going
backwards these days. Good old Microsoft.
Due to the massive influx of BeOS refugees and Linux users who got
tired of all the inconsistencies and lack of real progress, I'm not so
sure that technical Mac users are as rare as they used to be. Then
again, the technical users who can also write in coherent sentences may
be a little more rare.
Kris F.
Kris,
This discussion has got me making some changes in the
way I work. Instead of a folder with an archive of Low End Mac, which
is just a huge amount of files for the OS to keep track of, I'm going
to keep my archives in disk images. Only one file for the OS to track.
Much simpler.
I'm going to give your image-to-partition trick a try
after I finish updating the site on Friday. Mac OS X 10.4.10 works
just fine for me, except that I can't print to my b&w laser
printer. So I'll be doing a clean Tiger install, upgrading to 10.4.9,
and stopping there. Should be a lot faster from the hard drive. Thanks
for the tip!
I don't know the ins and outs how how DiskWarrior does
their "boot any Mac" trick, but it sure is clever.
The feature that doesn't work in Disk Utility if
you're using an older version of OS X to try to fix a newer one is
Repair Disk Permissions. I discovered that the last time I tried to run
it, because I had 10.4.10 on my boot partition, 10.4.7 on my emergency
partition.
SuperDuper does have a "sandbox" feature that lets you
experiment with an OS update before committing to it. I wish I'd tried
that when upgrading to 10.4.10. The minute I discovered I couldn't
print to my Brother laser printer I would have reverted to 10.4.9. But
it was a few days between the update and the next time I tried to
print. Sigh.
BeOS had some great ideas, and it was a lot of fun to
play with and show off. It could have been a contender, but Apple chose
NeXT and most Windows users won't ever consider another operating
system for their hardware. And when they do, nine times out of ten is
some Linux distro.
As Mac users, we're spoiled. Apple understands the
importance of the user interface, Microsoft understands the importance
of emulating that but doesn't really understand it. And Linux seems to
be mimicking Windows. Almost all of the good UI work seems to be going
on at Apple. So if Windows is a commercial knock-off of the Mac OS (in
most ways), Linux is a free knock-off of Windows without the pretty
interface.
There's a reason a lot of Linux users bought
PowerBooks and are now buying MacBooks. It's not just the excellent
Apple hardware design, it's the Mac OS X experience as well. It
shows them how good an operating system can be when people really
understand interface issues.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
