booting hackint0sh from firewire?

[BugsBunny]

is it possible?

If any of you successfully boot your hackintosh from a firewire drive I would go ahead and purchase this awesome external case for a 2.5" SATA drive (http://www.cyberport.de/item/1075/997/0/73553/Onnto_TB-S12O_USBFW400FW800_Combo_HD-Gehaeuse_25zoll_int_SATA.html?APID=6) which offers USB 2.0, FW 400 + FW 800 .. :)

Thank you for sharing your experience,
Bugs.

[gee]

i successfully booted form an external usb 2.0 device. should work with firewire too... i think :rolleyes:

[BugsBunny]

i successfully booted form an external usb 2.0 device. should work with firewire too... i think :rolleyes:Hi gee. How do you do that - can you be a bit more specific :rolleyes: ?

[pip11]

just use an install DVD and install onto an external USB drive. It has to be formatted with the standard BIOS partition table; Disk Utility can do this, but it will likely destroy other data on the drive. Once the install is done, just set your BIOS to boot off the usb disk. Not even the Vista betas can do it this easily (or at all!)

FireWire likely won't work though. OS X will probably install onto it, but I've never seen a PC BIOS that can boot from FireWire.

[BugsBunny]

yeah, I was afraid you would like me to do it that way - my laptop's BIOS does NOT allow to boot from USB, not even the most recent .. :(

ABout FW: I'll see if our Darwin bootloader will recognize my FW external drive once it is here. Someone over @ insanely mac said he doesn't think so because it would EFI, but he wasn't sure.

[cbreaker]

My BIOS does allow USB Booting, but not FireWire booting. I really wish USB never came around.. we could all be using FireWire everything - keyboards, drives, etc.

Anyways, if you had a FireWire card that had a boot BIOS (like a NIC or SCSI adapter) and the card was also supported by OSX then you could probably do it. I'm sure there's some FireWire cards out there with a boot BIOS.

[abcslayer]

Hey, if keyboard & mouse working through F.Wire the price of them will rise and you know, FireWire is not designed to be some kinds of low speed connection. It's optimized for high speed streaming media, that's is it strength over USB.
Not many BIOS (even recently released ones, because of even some BIOS are released recently, they are not new version from BIOS maker like Phoenix or AMI - the mainboard makers just customized old version to work on modern board, that would save them $ from buying licenses for new BIOS versions.) have FireWire booting, I suggest you looking for AMI BIOS. Most of modern (except Intel board) mainboard with AMI BIOS have very good support for booting from something other than HDD and FDD, ^_^.

[abcslayer]

And an update for you, many PPL (including me >_^) could boot Windows XP or Vista over USB.

[cbreaker]

Hey, if keyboard & mouse working through F.Wire the price of them will rise and you know, FireWire is not designed to be some kinds of low speed connection.

We aren't likely to see FireWire keyboards and mice due to USB but the interface can do it just fine. It doesn't matter what it was optimized for - mice and keyboards are very low bandwidth it just doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is that the specification was indeed designed with "any device" in mind, and was meant to be the single interface for all external devices. Including CD-ROMs, Mice, Scanners, hard drives, etc. It's especially good at streaming devices like hard disks and video cameras, because this was it's focus, but it can do everything else too.

Unfortunately, like many things tech, there's a power struggle between big corporations. Apple pretty much blew it with FireWire. Jobs wanted to charge everyone $1 per firewire port on any computer or device. Intel, having contributed to the standard quite a bit, wasn't happy, and developed USB 2.0 instead of moving to FireWire. Now, there's a governing body that charges 25 cents for each port. Still BS in my opinion but it's more reasonable.

FireWire devices aren't expensive or complicated to implement and there would be no reason it would be more expensive then USB on small devices. The original higher cost was Apple's desire to charge everyone $1 per port.

But, that's neither here nor there. PC's don't generally have the ability to boot from FireWire, unless you have a replacement BIOS that's more like OpenBIOS or Apple's EFI firmware. Then, you could do anything with it, but like current BIOS's, each one has to be designed/set up for the board it's running on because they're all different.

[xevean]

just use an install DVD and install onto an external USB drive. It has to be formatted with the standard BIOS partition table; Disk Utility can do this, but it will likely destroy other data on the drive. Once the install is done, just set your BIOS to boot off the usb disk. Not even the Vista betas can do it this easily (or at all!)

FireWire likely won't work though. OS X will probably install onto it, but I've never seen a PC BIOS that can boot from FireWire.

if you boot off the install dvd you can change the root volume that it boots off of by rd=diskZsX
where z is the disk # and X is the partition number, i use this all the time to boot off a firewire conected os x drive and it works fine.

to get the disk and partition number you can boot into the dvd and go to terminal and type diskutil list and it will show you the number, also make sure to boot with the -f option otherwise it will load with the extension cache of the install dvd.

so for example here is what i do

-v -f rd=disk2s1

hope that helps you out

xevean