Backing Up Firewire Partition to Notebook.

[dnanian]

I don't think Disk Utility is going to help you here. The problem I see is that you're trying to do too many things with too few partitions. I mean, you can back up your files to the laptop, but the laptop is far more likely to fail (given the heat environment, and the fact that it's portable) than the external drive, so it's sort of false security...