How to setup and boot off external FireWire Drive?

I use my MacBook Pro for most everything except at home where I have a desktop system that's a few years old. The MacBook Pro should generally run rings around it except for disk performance and that's something that I'd like to fix. So I picked up a 1 TB MyBook and it's attached to the MacBook Pro right now but the MBP doesn't see the disk. I assume that I need to partition and format the drive.

The MacBook Pro currently has Mac OSX and Windows XP on the internal drive and they work just fine. What I'd like to do is to be able to boot Mac OSX, WinXP x64 and Win32 off of the 1 TB drive. I was hoping to partition it into three pieces and boot whichever OS I wanted at the time.

What I'd like to know is if it is possible to do this (3 OS on one external drive that the Mac could boot from) and how to go about setting this up. I would grab XP x64 and XP Win32 off another machine (that machine has three Windows licenses running) and move them to the MacBook Pro (with Microsoft's help if needed).

 

You can boot osx from an external drive, and run off of it perfectly fine. The easiest way to do it is just to copy your current osx partition on the laptop hdd, over to the external.

Use carboncopycloner, or super duper to do that, and oull be able to make a bootable version of it.

As far as booting windows off an external drive on macs, I dont know if that can be done, never looked into it, maybe someone else can comment on that.

Though I have tried booting from an external drive which had a bootcamp partition on it, and it wasnt an option when i was booting up. I could only choose the osx partition to boot from.

Just a note, I assume you can boot of of a firewire drive, but im not 100% sure, I know you can boot from usb for sure though.

 

I found the disk utility so I was able to partition the drive. I also found the copy utility and started to run it but stopped it when it said that it would take 5 hours. That approach might not work if files change while it is running. It might be cleaner to just reinstall OSX to the FireWire drive though it will probably be two days of work with all of the software that I'd want to put on it.

I assumed that you can boot OSX from FireWire as that's Apple's "native" connection option. The MyBook has USB 2.0, FireWire 400 (I looked for 800 in the store but couldn't find any external drive that supports it) and eSata. eSata via ExpressCard would be my first option but I don't know if Apple can boot in that configuration. I would be happy if I can get Mac OSX running off the external drive and then go on from there.

 

Format the partition on the drive as Mac OS Extended Journaled and install the OS to the partition. Thats how I did it for Mac OS. Dont know how to do it for Windows

 

I dont believe you can boot any version of windows off an external hard drive

 

You cant boot form an osx partition over esata.

 

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my internal Mac OSX partition to the external FireWire 400 drive and it booted! I wasn't able to install Mac OSX to the external drive. When I tried to do that, I just got an endless loop of the system trying to boot over and over and over again.

I did a little reading and it looks like no eSATA boot. I also read that going to an interface faster than FireWire 400 really won't make a difference in performance unless I was using RAID so I may just live with FireWire 400. One nice thing about this drive is that it powers down with the system.

My Dell XPS M1330 apparently will boot off an external USB drive. There is an option that allows that in the BIOS.

I do Mac OSX/Windows 32-bit/64-bit development and wanted to use the MacBook Pro for everything as it is our fastest system but it looks like that won't be possible. I do like the faster drive for Mac OSX and will probably boot Mac OSX from that drive at home. It might be that I need to keep using my home desktop for Windows x64 builds or use my XPS M1330 for that. It depends on whether I can continue to use XP for builds or get dragged kicking and screaming into Vista-land.

I don't think that Virtual Machines would be a good option as my builds use a ton of memory, up to 1.6 GB unless I upgrade to an 8 GB MacBook Pro. Not likely anytime soon. I should see if I can get a Firefox mainline build going as I have some stuff to get in after 3.1.

 

If you use carbon copy cloner or super duper, is there a way to not have it copy everything? (ie. not my itunes library) I want to be able to boot off my external as well, but I want to keep that partition as small as possible since I also use it for Time Machine Backups.
Thanks