SOLVED Boot from firewire 800 drive

[Lufbrarunner]

I recently acquired an iMac 20", early 2008 model. I noticed that it had firewire 400 and firewire 800 ports, so I dug out an old HDD docking station that I had and connected it up using the fw800, slotted in a hard disk and it worked perfectly. I then wondered about booting to an SSD with this. The only spare SSD I had was 60gb, but for testing purposes this would be fine. When I tried to clone the Macintosh drive to the SSD using SuperDuper I kept getting an error saying that SuperDuper could not establish ownership of this drive, in fact any drive as I tried a couple of HDDs as well. Eventually I tried to clone using Carbon Copy Cloner and this worked first time.
Next, try to boot from the SSD. I did the hold option key while powering on but the drive did not appear. So I tried the same drive using USB with no problem. On retrying the drive via firewire it did appear and worked fine.
Comparing boot times, booting from the internal HDD takes 54 seconds and from the external SSD on fw800 33 seconds.
I am going to purchase a larger SSD and swap it out with the 160gb macintosh drive and see where that takes us.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

I am awaiting delivery of a 500gb SSD to put in this. In the meantime I have put in a 1tb HDD as the drive that was fitted was only 160gb. The transplant went well and the patient is doing well

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

The 2008 iMac should startup from an external FireWire 800 drive without issue. The only things I can think of would be how it was formatted, even before cloning it, and possibly the FireWire port on the docking station or the cable.

Keep us in the loop.

C

 

[Lufbrarunner]

Hi Cory, All working fine now, other than superduper. I have emailed the developers with an error report, hoping to hear back soon.

 

[Cory Cooper]

No worries..

Definitely let us know what they say, as I am interested to see what the cause may have been.

Be well,

C

 

[Lufbrarunner]

I received a reply from Dave Nanian at Shirt Pocket with a link to another version of SuperDuper 3.3.1 (v121.s7) which worked perfectly. I had been using 3.3.1 (v121) which is on my other 2 iMacs and works ok.
Very happy with the response from Shirt Pocket, a speedy reply and a quick resolution of the problem, nice people to do business with.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

Yes, Dave is a very nice and very responsive developer.

Glad you dfound a solution.

C