Your Firewire Drive and Mac mini

Shawn: just listening to the latest show and your problems with trying to run your backup on your Mac mini.

There is a much simpler way of working with a firewire drive and a Mac: boot off the firewire drive, so that you can use your files directly from the firewire drive.

There is a trick, though. You have to format the firewire drive to match the computer. If it's an Intel (like your portable), use Drive Utility and Partition it using the GUID Partition Table (under Options). If you don't, it won't boot.

Works if both the original and the substitute computer are both Intel Macs.

If you are trying to boot a Power PC computer, you would have to partition the firewire drive using the Apple Partition table.

If the firewire drive is the wrong partition type, you could partition a second firewire drive and then use SuperDuper to clone you back-up to the second firewire drive. However, if you have Intel OS programs, they won't work properly.

Hope this helps.

Jeff Carruthers