iBook won't boot from firewire disk

[Michael George]

On Dec 15, 2003, at 10:43 AM, Michael George wrote:
> In a previous thread I sought help on creating a bootable firewire 
> drive.  Using Bill Fink's and Richard McLain's HOWTOs and 1:1 advice 
> from Gavin Hemphill, I now have a firewire disk booting YDL 3.0.1.
>
> Great Joy!
>
> I created this drive with both SMP and UP kernels and initrds (though 
> the latter could probably have been shared) so that I can boot my 
> iBook (14", purchased May 2002) and our company XServe (1GHz model, 
> purchased June 2002) from it.
>
> However, when I plug the drive into the iBook, power up the drive, and 
> power up the iBook with the opt key pressed, it will give me the 
> graphical boot screen, but the firewire disk is not on it like it is 
> on my PowerMac.
>
> I would expect that if I didn't genericise the config files correctly, 
> it would have trouble booting, but since I cannot even get it to the 
> first-stage bootloader, I suspect something else is amiss.
>
> Anyone out there have an external FW disk that boots on an iBook?  
> Anyone with a FW disk that boots on a PowerMac, but *not* an iBook?

I found a posting on this list from back in May 2001 and the poster 
indicated that he had to reboot his system to get the firewire drive 
recognized as a boot drive.  On a cold boot it wouldn't be recognized.

I did this  and it worked.  However, I'm currently suffering a huge 
number of sbp2 resets followed by endless I/O errors.  That might be 
drive issues or something...  I'll have to try another drive...

-Michael