After a power outage, my external 500 gig Firewire Verbatim HD, (which functioned as my boot drive for my eMac,) refused to power on. I took the unit to MacHQ (a nearby Mac Repair Business) and they pulled the Samsung drive out of the Verbatim enclosure and installed it into a Macally enclosure. When I connected it to my network, the two 250 gig partitions appeared on the desktop as expected. 1 icon of my OS and 1 icon of the generic Firewire HD graphic. Since I wanted that unit to function again as my startup disk, I selected it in the startup menu. Everything seemed correct. Unfortunately, the unit would not start the Mac. It clearly tried to be the startup disk, but at some point in the procedure the Mac reverts to its internal smaller, older System on the internal HD.
MacHQ suggested that the unit may have suffered some additional damage to the file system when the power went off and recommended that I should Archive and install a new System from my Leopard DVD to comb out any "bugs." After doing that, unfortunately there was no change. Even when selected as startup, the Macally external will grind a short while but the internal HD eventually wins out and that becomes the system of record every time. I am at a loss. MacHQ is not sure, but postulated that there could be some conflict with the new drive since it included eSATA capabilities that might hinder the Firewire functioning. Try as I might, I can't get my head around that concept. The fact is that the disk booted when it was in the other Verbatim enclosure, the data on the disk all seems to be intact, the system is spanking new, and Disk Util sees the drive as bootable and perhaps most importantly, Macally itself states on the info sheet that it is compatible all the way back to 10.2.8 thru 10.6. What ideas do any of you have as to what would cause the Leopard OS external HD to be unable to boot the eMac like it did before? Don Wakefield -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
