Disk compatibility

[donlibes]

My Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB is able to boot my G5 after I repartitioned the drive as APM. I wish I had known about the partitioning stuff in advance because the FreeAgent package said "Formatted for Mac!" but what that really meant was that it was GUID so my first attempt to create a bootable drive merely created a readable drive, not a bootable drive. Oops. Works now, though.

By the way, how does one tell what kind of chipset is used? It's not on the product box and I went to the manufacturer's website and can't find it there either. I suspect it's not the chipset but rather some part of the Firewire protocol that simply isn't implemented on these other chipsets. (I took a look at the Firewire docs and they're filled with versions and options, sigh. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.) I spoke to an Apple engineer and asked if Apple could formally describe their requirements for a bootable drive and his response was "Apple doesn't support firewire boot. If it works for you, that's great but it's not supported." So that's their way of getting out of having to explain their requirements. Sigh.