Firewire drive

A Firewire drive is an external hard drive that can be connected to a computer using a Firewire cable using Firewire 400 or Firewire 800. These drives are great for booting a Mac when it is having problems, during the imaging process, and other situations.

You must have separate Firewire drives in order to boot PowerPC Macs and Intel Macs because they must be reformatted in a new partition format specific to the Intel Macs, called GUID Partition Table (GPT). This is an option you can select in the Intel Macs' Disk Utility. Disks using the Apple Partition Map (APM) partition scheme could be read, but not booted from, on Intel Macs. Similarly, drives reformatted to use GPT won't boot on PPC Macs, and will only be readable on Macs running Tiger.

Setting up an Intel Firewire Drive

1. Find an Intel mac along with its installation discs that came with the computer.
2. Boot the Machine from the CD's. When you can, select the Disk Utility Application from the Tools Menu. You might have to advance a screen or so in the Installation process in order to do this.
3. Go into the Disk Utility from the Tools menu and repartition the Firewire drive using the options button on the "partition" options of the drive itself. Chose the GUID Partition Scheme. Then Partition the drive.
   
   
4. Finish the installation process by selecting the Firewire Drive as the installation destination Drive and Install. The computer will reboot in the end and you will have won.

Setting up a PowerPC Firewire Drive

Follow the same directions as you did with making the Intel Firewire drive, only use a PowerPC computer and format appropriately. You may not even need to reformat the disk, if not, don't.