At 9:46 PM -0500 12/08/2005, Gary F. Daught wrote:
On Dec 8, 2005, at 3:31 PM, Dan wrote:
Since you're booted from the CF card, you have nothing on the HD of interest?
I'm not sure what you're asking me here.
Just trying to figure out if you need the drive to be alive at all.
The current hard drive in my 2400 is only 1GB, only a little larger
than the 1GB CF card. I'm doing the CF card thing primarily to run
my PB silently and to extend battery life. Until I get the courage
and the funds to invest in and install a larger hard drive, I am
envisioning the hard drive as a back-up for the CF card, an
emergency boot disk, and a place to store docs.
Ok. To store documents on it, you'll need to leave it mounted.
That's ok. Once you configure your apps to leave the drive alone, it
will stay spun-down until you need it.
Since the CF is a non-volatile memory, I think it would work best to
be putting your active documents there in the first place. IOW,
ultimately make the only thing that accesses the HD be YOU - doing a
manual file copy from the Finder, or with a backup program. That way
no app will have a stray tendril reaching to the HD that it can use
to spin it up when you don't expected it to.
I notice the spin-up at startup even though the card is the boot drive.
As long as the drive is physically present, it will always spin up
during boot. That's just the nature of the boot/init process.
Although I would lose the boot capability (or to choose it as a
Startup disk from the Control Panel), would/could I be OK with
completely removing the System and Apps from the hard drive, and
simply have it formatted as a storage drive?
Absolutely. But, I wouldn't remove that stuff from the drive tho,
unless you really need to the space for your documents. Having an
immediately available backup of your System Folder and Applications
is a Good Thing.
You just need to identify what's being accessed, so you can move it to the CF.
hum. Have you ever used MacsBug? With it, you can view a list of
all open files.
[etc] iTunes insists that the iTunes Music Library is on the hard
drive, even though I copied it to the card. Is this a case-by-case
scenario?
yea. Some apps are just cranky like that. You'll have to figure 'em
out on a case-by-case basis.
What does this entail, say with Internet Explorer? Is this a case of
trashing prefs and caches, etc., or should I remove the app entirely
from the hard drive?
Copy the app to the CF card. Locate its preferences in the System
Folder on the HD. Copy them to the same place on the CF card.
Launch the copy of the app on the CF card by double-clicking on it
directly. Go thru its settings to make sure none still point to the
HD.
In general, that's the same procedure for all apps.
Thanks for assisting a CF card newbie! This is a very interesting exercise,
yea, VERY interesting. I didn't even know you could do such a thing!
:) It's got me thinking about trying it myself. I've got a couple
of old PB's sitting here.
though I'm currently a bit frustrated because the continual hard
drive spin-ups are contrary to my expectations for switching to the
CF card as my boot drive. Actually, I'm not using the PB in such a
way as to require loads of extra space. I still have 324MB of free
space on the card. Unless I was interested in loading-up on mp3s or
photos, I can't really imagine needing much more space anyway (I use
iTunes mainly to access Internet radio stations).
Try Audion. Smaller memory footprint and uses much less CPU.
(I hate iTunes! Such a piggy app for doing so little!)
If someone told me they've essentially abandoned their hard drive
and use only a CF card that would be of interest to me. I just don't
have enough experience with them to make this leap. Having a backup
boot option is reassuring for me.
What you're trying to do WILL work. You've already passed the
biggest hurdle - getting the system booted on the CF card in the
first place. Now it's just a case of redirecting the various apps to
the right source...
I've done this type of backwards cloning a number of times, HD to HD.
It just takes a bit of work. Just did it in OS X. Took me two days
to find an alias to a file AppleWorks was grabbing -- kept making my
(now) spare drive spin up. \
- Dan.
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