Hey Brothers,

i just got a nice'n'fresh Samsung 400GB Harddisk and a sleek Firewire-Case. Formatted in OS X, no partitions, means: a whopping 400GB for backups.

Now, i don't remember what the limits of OS9 were. In OS X the HD is running fine, and in OS9 all seems OK, too. Copying stuff over works. flawless.

All i know is that the internal AT-Cntroller in *most* OS9-Machines is limited to 128GB max. But this HD isn't internal but connected via Firewire, so this limit isn't affecting the HD AFAIK?

Holy herring, and this HD is so silent. Scary!
Even more silent than my Seagate 250GB SATA.

This would appear to be the info you need, smithz. It would appear that the answer is 2 terabytes for OS 9 when the volume is formatted in HFS Plus.

Oh, thanks a lot!

That makes me scratch my head a bit more. My internal 250GB HD is split into X partitions, because i thought that 128MB is the maximum partition size in 9. I have to re-arrange that crap soon.

You're welcome, smithz. I've got a 300 GB Maxtor drive that I'm thinking of sticking inside my G4 Tower as backup. I'd like to be able to take my whole OS X installation and clone it. I know there are some tools to do so, but I was just wondering if you perhaps knew the best way to do it.

Oh-oh BN, i got zero experience in cloning OS X drives. The only useful thing i may know is that the app "Carbon Copy Cloner" http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html seems to be the "number one" tool for that.

Smithz is the internal drive SATA? If you have a PCI controller card ATA or SATA in any G3 or G4 both 9 and X will see larger than 128GB HD's.

The <128GB limit comes into play for machines prior to around 2002 that had motherboard ATA controllers that could not see more than 128GB. I think starting with the QuickSilver models there is not an issue seeing >128GB with the ATA controller on the motherboard.

Drives are way to cheap today to have to partition. I would install another drive for a new volume than partition.

I recently purchased a Western Digital Passport external USB 2.0 HD. It was on sale for $90US. It is really small. It is powered by the USB 2.0 connection. Some laptops might not have enough juice in the USB connection. Mine will only work with the short cable that came with it. At first I thought it was not going to work because I was using two separate longer cables that I already had. If the drive was going to fail it past the early test. I was shaking and taping it trying to get it to mount. I finally tried the supplied cable it has worked fine since.

Western Digital sells this custom USB cable for the power issue. It uses two USB ports to supply enough power. What I love about this is WD is selling it for $10. To get a simple USB or Firewire cable will cost you double even triple the cost. How can WD supply some funky custom cable at a fraction of the cost that a Staples or Best Buy charges for normal ones? CAT 5 cable too. A 50 foot CAT 5e cable can run $25. You can buy a 500' spool of CAT 5e for $25.

BN what is the purpose of cloning the system? I have never cloned a system. I usually just back up the Home folder. Carbon Copy Cloner was the deal back in the day for cloning. Here is another Super Duper. You might be able to use Disk Utility to make a disk image of the system as well.

quote:

Originally posted by RicoX:
Smithz is the internal drive SATA? If you have a PCI controller card ATA or SATA in any G3 or G4 both 9 and X will see larger than 128GB HD's.

Thanks. Yep, i got a Sonnet Tempo-SATA Controller and that 250GB Seagate drive connected.
I don't want another drive, because less drives make less noise. But i created too many partitions i never use. (Linux partition, i never installed linux afterwards, waste of time)...

You are good to go then smithz with repartitioning the 250.

Brad, I've been cloning my OS X hard drive as a backup strategy. I figure if the drive fails I can be back up an running in less than twenty minutes with everything, passwords, preferences, application support files, the whole shebang, just as it was. No dicking around.

For this job I prefer the backup program that Rico recommended above, SuperDuper.

I think I'm going to do the same cloning thing, but with some portable Firewire hard drives that I'm thinking of picking up. And screw backup programs, they never work for me. Always a problem, always some BS when it comes to restoring.

An alternative to installing an ATA controller card so that you can use drives larger than 128GB in machine (like mine) that don't recognize larger drives is the driver SpeedTools ATA Hi-Cap , which allows these machines to see past the 128GB limit. Without it no matter how much larger than 128GB the drive you install is the machine only sees it as a 128GB drive. You will need to partition larger drives because you can't have a volume larger than 128GB, but at least you'll be able to use the extra space.

For some reason I already had the SpeedTools ATA Hi-Cap installer on my machine. I have no idea where it came from. Maybe it was part of another package or maybe it came with one of the many hard drives I have purchased over the years. I didn't know my machine had the 128GB restriction until a couple of years ago when I bought a 180G drive and saw that over 50GB or so was missing. I installed ATA Hi-Cap and there it was! I've been using this kernel extension for a few years now and haven't run into any problems at all. None whatsoever.

quote:

Originally posted by thalo:
I think I'm going to do the same cloning thing, but with some portable Firewire hard drives that I'm thinking of picking up. And screw backup programs, they never work for me. Always a problem, always some BS when it comes to restoring.

I picked up a 500GB Firewire/USB 2 external drive for a song and use it for all my backups. Tons of room for me.

When it comes to restoring I'm sticking with Rico's revommendation -- SuperDuper. All it does is make an accurate disk image, nothing more. You don't use SuperDuper to do the restoring. You use the Disk Utility.app that comes with OS X for restoring. I like this strategy better than companies that force you to rely on their software for restoration. You can always find a copy of the Disk Utility.app.

Yep, HH. I was thinking of the idea of a backup so that I could be up and running should a hard drive or something else fail. Thanks to you and Rico for recommending SuperDuper. And thanks, smithz. I had heard of Carbon Copy Cloner but couldn't think of the name. It's free (or donation-ware) so it's got that going for it.

Double H you must have bought that SpeedTools extension at some point. Maybe it was cheaper shareware paypal price back then. At least someone had to have purchased it at some point for you. It is a commercial product now. Maybe you got it from a vendor.

I have not used SuperDuper but the developer works in education so he offers it free of use to such organizations. Cloning has not been a concern of mine because I have the OS on a drive by itself. If the OS gets so bent out of shape I would just reinstall. Cloning would save time. I may do this in the office.

Disk Utility can be used to make a backup of your system as well. I think it is best done starting up from an install CD to make the disk image. The restores might not be as reliable as using SuperDuper but it can be done.

How is that CPU upgrade doing? By my estimates if Markle had gotten an upgrade say 5 years ago and the extra speed conservatively saved him 5 minutes a day. He could have added more than 6 days of leisure time to his life instead of waiting for his ancient CPU to start up change pages surf the internet.

Beats me. I guess my wife may have bought SpeedTools at some point for some reason.

Like you, I also keep OS X on its own drive. I know in the case of hard drive failure I could just do a clean install, but that wouldn't get me back to where I was because of passwords, preferences, application support files and hundreds of other files specific to my present installation. Doing a clean install is a different decision and potentially a more time consuming project than a simple restoration from a disk image. Besides, I already have a clean install on my Firewire backup drive and I can always just boot from it. For that matter of fact I can always boot from my OS 9 drive.

The CPU upgrade has been working fine after (as you remember) a rocky start. As far as I can tell I've had no problems with it at all since then.

Brad, You can download SuperDuper and do all the cloning you want for free. All the purchase price does is turn on additional features which you may or may not want. The only additional feature that I found useful was the "Smart Update" feature that only copies the recent changes to the disk image. Now, this is faster than cloning the entire disk, but the downside is that the disk image starts growing very large after a while as the changes are added to it and if your backup space is limited you are forced to do a full clone anyway. I've been using SuperDuper for a couple of years now. Originally I was using Carbon Copy Cloner, but I found SuperDuper better for a few reasons, although at this point I can't recall exactly what those reasons are.