Running from external drive during repair period...

[gayle28607]

Hi,

I'm looking for a strategy to allow me to work with little or no interruption while my G4 PowerBook 17 is in for a hardware repair (the display has vertical lines on it). This is what I am thinking of doing:

1. Make a bootable backup of my entire 17 inch PB drive on my external firewire drive. (Using SD; I do this as a backup strategy already.)
2. Send in 17 inch for repair.
3. Turn on external firewire drive and connect to old 15 inch PB.
4. Start old 15 inch PB holding down option key and select external firewire drive.
5. While 17 inch PB is gone, always run from the firewire drive connected to the 15 inch PB.
6. When 17 inch returns, use SuperDuper from firewire drive to backup to 17 inch so that everything on the 17 inch is up to date.

Would this work? If not, what should I do? The 15 inch PB only has a 30 gig hard drive and the 17 inch has 100 gigs. My external firewire drive is 160 gigs.

[dnanian]

Should work just fine, Gayle. Test that you can start up as expected before you send in the Mac!

[gayle28607]

Thanks, Dave. The part I was the least secure about was asking SD to write from the firewire drive back to the repaired 17 inch PB. I really appreciate your confirmation that this should work.

I will definitely test this setup before I let the 17 inch go!

[dnanian]

Great -- and good luck!

[gayle28607]

For anyone who is in a similar situation, I am booted off of my Other World Computing mercury elite firewire hard drive, while typing on the keyboard and viewing the screen of the old PB. Nice! The lag time is almost imperceptible, and it's as though I still have the 17 inch PB, though it is now on its way to Apple for a repair.

I will admit, though, this screen seems kind of small...
Yeah SuperDuper!

[dnanian]

Cool, eh?

[gayle28607]

My computer is back from repair, complete with a perfect screen, all taken care of by Apple from Wednesday to Monday, including transit, and covered by Apple Care.

But what makes this even better is that when I got the computer back, I plugged it in to by backup hard drive, booted from the backup, and voila! SuperDuper used smart update to update the repaired hard drive and in less than 10 minute everything was up to the minute on my repaired computer.

This procedure worked perfectly; thanks SuperDuper!

[dnanian]

Congratulations on a restored -- and fixed -- Mac!