Disk compatibility

[Estuary]

My Maxtor FireWire 400 EHD may be dying, so I'm looking to replace it with a FireWire 800 drive. I see that Maxtor is now owned by Seagate. Are Seagate EHDs recommended? Also, any opinions on Iomega FW 800's? Thanks in advance.

[dnanian]

I would probably suggest the LaCie d2 Quadra or 2big.

[RockBottom]

I recently purchased a LaCie d2 quadra 3-TB hard disk and plugged it using its FireWire 800 connector: I ran SuperDuper 2.6.2 using the standard "backup - all files" script to make it bootable (X 10.5.8), and it seemed that everything went well, but in the end the drive wasn't actually bootable… it didn't even show when pressing the option key at boot time, even though it appeared as one of the bootable candidates when viewed by the start-up disk pref-pane!

• I tried again with the latest SuperDuper 2.6.4: same result…
• I partitioned (GUID scheme) the drive (three 931-GB volumes) then tried to back up the system files on the first, then on the second partition: to no avail…
• I tried the same on a 2-year old Lacie d2 quadra 1-TB : no problem!

should I conclude that this particular type of drive can't be used to boot OS X, or is there something I'm doing wrong?

[dnanian]

Try connecting it with USB instead. Does it show up at Option+boot then?